Though "legal constraints" thus far have prevented
American Airlines, British Airways and Iberia Airlines from issuing single
corporate contracts encompassing the three partner carriers, they expect to
"start rolling them out soon, and by soon I mean the first quarter this
year or early next quarter," according to Iberia U.S. country manager José
María Alvarado. By year-end, the carriers expect to transition all pre-existing
transatlantic corporate contracts to their antitrust-immune joint business.
Representatives from AA, BA and Iberia, however, expect agency contracts to be
converted as soon as next month.
"We still have to overcome some legal constraints
around the contracting part of it," Alvarado said of joint corporate
deals, "but the good news is that we are creating some contracting
guidelines that all three of us can abide by."
According to an Iberia spokesperson, the legal issues relate
to "certain confidentiality clauses" in existing contracts between
the airlines and their respective corporate clients. In November, a BA
executive told attendees at a Guild of Travel Management Companies conference
that three-quarters of its clients had signed confidentiality-clause waivers
allowing the airline to share data about them with its new joint venture
partners.
However, those issues have not prevented the carriers from
cooperating on corporate sales. AA, BA and Iberia, Alvarado said, jointly have
bid on corporate business and in some cases formulated contracts to replace
those that expired since the October launch of the joint venture. Those, he
noted, are "not a single contract," but rather "an aligned
contact from all three carriers."
"We have some RFPs already in the market that we need
to respond to quickly, and there are some opportunities," Alvarado added.
"We are taking a soft approach, but our goal is to have every contract out
there being a joint-business contract."
AA regional vice president of passenger sales Cathy Berg
said there is no "hard date" to fully transition separate AA, BA and
Iberia corporate contracts to the joint business. The goal, though, is to
complete those this year, according to BA regional director Kevin Burns.
"We're taking them on where there are RFPs for renewal
and where we see opportunities to put something in place that didn't really
exist before," Berg said.
On the agency side, Burns said to expect "a much more
immediate and comprehensive response. There's an April 1 start for that."
While executives claimed no major changes to the sales
organizations at their respective airlines as a result of the joint business,
they noted that the airlines in major U.S. markets are moving personnel under
one roof. AA, BA and Iberia have co-located offices in Washington and Chicago,
for example, and this spring plan to move into one New York office.
The article originally
was published in The Beat.