Friday, January 11, 2008
The Sky Is Opening Up!
British Airways made the official announcement this week. They're starting a brand new airline! Starting this summer, the British carrier will be taking advantage of the new US/EU Open Skies agreement to start an airline whose main base of operations will be New York to fly business class passengers to mainland Europe.
These 757 aircraft will fly from New York to Brussels or Paris, with a three class 80 seat configuration. The decision is probably to do a few things. First, like Delta did with their experimental secondary airline, Song, to test out new innovations, services and potentially revenue making service for British Airways transcontinental product. Second, it is to help British Airways take advantage of testing the Open Skies waters to see how profitable it will be to make direct flights between the US and mainland Europe happen. And third, it's there to try to decimate the all-business airlines that are starting to cannibalize market share from British Airways. If the first destination is Paris, that means that they're after L'Avion. The NYC-Paris all business class airline.
That's the part that doesn't make sense to me. Why wouldn't BA go after Silverjet and Eos - since the airlines are direct competition with their NYC to London route? Probably because the risk of stealing their own market share is pretty great. So why go after business that isn't really hurting you?
This is a move, that I don't really understand that much. I can't see the profit in it, it just looks like hubris from an airline that thinks it can be dominant in transatlantic markets, when in reality, it probably can't be.
OpenSkies has a website that's really more of a blog than anything else. It is expected to start flying this summer. And my expectation? It will stop flying sometime next summer, to be replaced with regular British Airways service.
These 757 aircraft will fly from New York to Brussels or Paris, with a three class 80 seat configuration. The decision is probably to do a few things. First, like Delta did with their experimental secondary airline, Song, to test out new innovations, services and potentially revenue making service for British Airways transcontinental product. Second, it is to help British Airways take advantage of testing the Open Skies waters to see how profitable it will be to make direct flights between the US and mainland Europe happen. And third, it's there to try to decimate the all-business airlines that are starting to cannibalize market share from British Airways. If the first destination is Paris, that means that they're after L'Avion. The NYC-Paris all business class airline.
That's the part that doesn't make sense to me. Why wouldn't BA go after Silverjet and Eos - since the airlines are direct competition with their NYC to London route? Probably because the risk of stealing their own market share is pretty great. So why go after business that isn't really hurting you?
This is a move, that I don't really understand that much. I can't see the profit in it, it just looks like hubris from an airline that thinks it can be dominant in transatlantic markets, when in reality, it probably can't be.
OpenSkies has a website that's really more of a blog than anything else. It is expected to start flying this summer. And my expectation? It will stop flying sometime next summer, to be replaced with regular British Airways service.
Labels: british airways, openskies, travel
Roger, 1:16 AM
