Thank you Ozzy. I was rather drawing on my experience in banking. It is the norm there to routinely ask clients of competitors for their business and there are no barriers to customers moving from one bank to another. In the name of competition however, RBS has been instructed to reduce its market share of business accounts and customers are actively encouraged - and incentivised - to move elsewhere.
The pool of business customers in the UK is vast and the risk to any one bank of losing a few customers is small.
However, airlines are certainly moving in the direction forecast by MOL a couple of years ago and are consolidating to a small core which between them will hold great market power. When I posed my earlier question about regulation, I should have indicated that my interest was around the potential for the market to be distorted by both a small number of airlines and a small number of airports. Given the high number of recent failures, perhaps a reduction in choice is inevitable.....as long as it isn’t on the back of retrenchment to the Big Smoke as alluded to above.