The U.S. Department of Transportation on Tuesday
granted American Airlines, British Airways and Iberia, along with Finnair and
Royal Jordanian, antitrust immunity to jointly set fares, align capacity, plan
service and share revenues across the Atlantic, finalizing a tentative approval
from February and enabling those Oneworld carriers to compete with SkyTeam and
Star Alliance competitors in the new realm of joint venture corporate contracting.
DOT maintained the conditions it placed on the carriers' tentative approval,
requiring American and British Airways to relinquish to competitors four daily
slot pairs at Heathrow Airport "with two pairs to be used for
Boston-London service and the other two for service from any other U.S.
cities," DOT said.
The European Commission last week closed its own investigation on the proposed
joint venture, giving the carriers its blessing but requiring them to make good
on a concession to make slots available "to facilitate the entry or
expansion of competitors on routes between London and New York, Boston, Dallas
and Miami."
The growing dominance of transatlantic joint ventures is fundamentally
changing how airlines sell services to corporate travel buyers, as government approvals for antitrust immunity are converting nearly
one dozen distinct transatlantic competitors into three dominant entities that
in total control 80 percent of the North Atlantic market.
Among those, SkyTeam carriers Air France-KLM and Delta Air Lines—along with their
newest joint venture partner, Alitalia—require transatlantic corporate
contracts to go through the group. That model is mimicked on the transatlantic
by Star Alliance carriers Air Canada, Continental Airlines, Lufthansa and
United Airlines, and now by Oneworld's AA, BA and Iberia.
The Oneworld partners have not had good luck with regulators in the
past. BA and AA in January 2002 retracted their second application for
antitrust immunity after regulators demanded they surrender 224 weekly slots at
London Heathrow Airport. The two carriers also failed in 1999 to obtain what
they considered acceptable terms for antitrust immunity.