Preliminary network analysis indicates that Aeroflot and Transaero are the only competitors on about a dozen city pairs from their Moscow bases.
Aeroflot and Transaero are set to consolidate with the Russian flag-carrier taking a 75% share in its privately-owned rival.
The possibility of reduced competition arising from a tie-up between the country’s top two airlines has been noted by the Federal Anti-monopoly Service, but it has yet to indicate whether it will demand any remedies.
Assessment of the airlines’ networks for September 2015 – achieved through Flightglobal’s FlightMaps Analytics tool – indicates that Aeroflot and Transaero overlap on some 65 non-stop city-pair routes from Moscow.
Transaero operates mainly from the Russian capital’s Vnukovo and Domodedovo airports while Aeroflot is based at Sheremetyevo.
FlightMaps indicates that the two carriers offer the only scheduled passenger services on 12 of those shared city pairs.
These routes include the domestic destinations of Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. But several of the overlapping connections are long-haul international services including Bangkok, Los Angeles and Hong Kong.
Russia’s third most significant carrier, S7 Airlines, provides a degree of competition to many high-profile destinations including Yakutsk, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Kazan and Samara.
Several shared routes, such as Moscow-Ekaterinburg and Moscow-Ufa, are flown by both Aeroflot and its spin-off budget carrier Pobeda, or other members of Aeroflot Group, and a number of routes, particularly international, are flown by only three carriers of which Aeroflot and Transaero are two.
UK budget airline EasyJet’s decision to withdraw from Moscow will leave British Airways as the only competitor to Aeroflot and Transaero on the route to London.
Aeroflot and Transaero share four routes from St Petersburg, two exclusively, and three from Ekaterinburg, FlightMaps indicates.
Transaero had been the Russian carrier most closely linked to Star Alliance, although it had not been a formal member.
Absorption into Aeroflot Group will give Transaero ties to SkyTeam. Oneworld also has a presence in Russia through S7 Airlines but Star is still lacking a partner in the country.
Source: Cirium Dashboard
