Austrian Airlines completed its move to the Star Alliance at the end of March, finally extricating itself from the Qualiflyer Group and ending a decade-long alliance with partner Swissair.
Austrian's joint president Dr Herbert Bammer concedes that the split has cost his airline Sch600 million ($42 million), with around half of that from dividing the joint sales teams and loyalty programmes. Analysts are watching to see how quickly the group can recoup the cost with benefits from Star, while also now competing with its former Swiss partners. The Austrian group's operating results only just stayed in the black for 1999 and the first few months of this year have been tough.
Bammer says that Austrian finally had to reconsider its options after Delta Air Lines left Qualiflyer, leaving the group without a US partner. "Delta was a model co-operation and we're trying to do something like this with United," he says. "We saw Swissair trying to assemble a group of European airlines, but some of them didn't mean anything to us." He concedes that the SAirGroup's attempts last year to buy up equity in the Austrian group without giving its partner full warning was "not friendly".
Source: Airline Business
