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EuroWire – November 2009
24
Transat lant ic Cable
The Texas-based airline announced its move on 27
th
October
to the Star Alliance, a transition meant to enable the carrier to
broaden the options available to its passengers.
With 21 new partners, including such majors as Scandinavian
Airlines and Germany’s Lufthansa, Continental would seem able
to deliver on its intention.
Reporter Alison Grant of the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
noted the
main benefit offered by airline alliances, those networks of
connectivity and convenience. International passengers may
accrue and consolidate frequent-flyer miles and redeem them
with any carrier within the network.
Member airlines, meanwhile, are able to extend their reach by
routing “shared” passengers among the partners. (“Continental
Airlines Switching to New Alliance of Carriers,” 18
th
August)
With Continental in the network, travellers on Star Alliance
affiliates will gain a convenient point of departure to Europe via
Continental’s hub in Newark (New Jersey), and to Latin America
from the Continental hub in Houston.
From a local perspective, Ms Grant wished to know what the
Star Alliance connection portended for passengers using the
airline’s hub in Cleveland.
Cleveland-region travellers on global itineraries will, of course,
enjoy readier access to destinations worldwide; and the city and
its environs will be more accessible to visitors from overseas as
sister airlines connect them to the Continental network.
But the presence of Chicago-based United Airlines in the
Star Alliance line-up suggests a potential drawback of these
compacts: two of the partners have overlapping routes, with an
implied threat of reduced competition and service cutbacks on
those routes.
Continental spokesman David Messing assured the
Plain Dealer
that United’s Chicago hub posed no danger of that kind. His
airline’s goal in joining Star, he said, is to increase volume on the
network, which should result in more traffic to all hubs. Given
the impact on major carriers, Continental among them, from the
downturn in air travel, this would be a welcome development.
But how realistic are such hopes? On 1
st
September Continental,
the fourth largest airline in the US as calculated by revenue
passenger miles, estimated that its August traffic slid 3.9% on a
6% reduction in seat capacity, compared with August 2008.
And United’s mainline capacity was down 8.9% in August
from a month earlier. In contrast, according to
Dow Jones
Newswires
, such low-cost carriers as US Airways said their
business was improving.