And Then There Was One
So British Airways announces yesterday that they're buying L'Avion which was the last of the all-business class airlines flying the trans-Atlantic route. L'Avion was the one French entry in the snooty class airlines. BA announced that they intend on merging operations with BA's new Open Skies subsidiary airline which means that there is still an all-business class airline flying across the pond.
I don't know but I suspect that Open Skies is a pretty astute move on BA's part. They stand back and let the various start-ups establish whether or not there is a market for all-business class flights and then they wait for them to go belly up when they fail to secure enough capitalization and are impacted by high fuel costs. Then they buy the one remaining airline eliminating the last competition, well other than the upper class products from the other legacy airlines. It'll be interesting to see how this all works out. I suspect that it'll be a good play. With weakening demand because of the economy and fuel prices, I suspect that there will be a lot less demand from the economy class travelers while the business class travelers will remain unaffected, at least for a while. Or I could just be whistling
Hopefully some day soon we'll get a chance to try Open Skies.
