Willie Walsh is very clever. Clever enough, in fact, to leave Ryanair plodding around Eastern and Southern Europe, on cheap fares, while he wants I.A.G to have a dominant share in the second busiest market in the world i.e. Ireland/U.K.
BTW, which is the busiest?
While everybody seems to be looking at an IAG t/over in the context of competing with BA, that ignores the fact that (apart from the ME3) BA's biggest competitor for ex UK International is AFKLM out of the regions. For example, even at NCL, AFKLM offers more frequency to connect with TA than BA. An aggressive marketing approach by IAG using ex-UK regions via Dublin for TA might result in a substantial extraction from AFKLM pax numbers, impacting on the sustainability of their feeds to Schiphol and CDG.
Exactly, have made the point in other posts. Both EI and KL connect some 20 UK airports to their hubs. BA cannot offer the same because of capacity constraints at LHR for the last 40 years. Buying EI allows BA to take on KL. Maybe this was part of the motivation for BA to buy KL all those years ago…..
This is going to sound bitter from a Brit but I hope all the transatlantic players big and small, from EI to AF/KL/DL to UA to FI etc. start to eat away at BA, because I think it's going to take BA losing out big time for the government to realise what a shambles LHR is and maybe even do something.
It does sound bitter, but don’t hold your breath.
It’s been happening for years, no, decades.
The government has remained unmotivated to allow LHR expansion.