As multinational companies assess the merits and impediments of contracting with a global alliance, Japan Airlines' inclusion in "early 2007" should improve Oneworld's positioning. JAL's official acceptance of the group's invitation closely followed a decision by Irish carrier Aer Lingus to leave Oneworld, owing to dramatic changes to its business model.
JAL would join American Airlines and British Airways as the partnership's largest members, and along with incoming members Royal Jordanian and Malev, help push Oneworld's global share to "almost 20 percent." It would complement Hong Kong's Cathay Pacific and Australia's Qantas in Oneworld's Asia-Pacific contingent. By comparison, the Star Alliance presence in the region includes Air New Zealand, ANA, Asiana, Singapore and Thai. Air China and Shanghai Airlines also have been invited by the Star Alliance. Meanwhile, SkyTeam continues to lag its two main competitors in Asia with just one member--Korean Airlines--though China Southern is expected to join next year.
"The expected explosive growth in Asia is absolutely driving each alliance to consider very purposefully how they want to address that region," said Nicholas Vournakis, vice president of the Carlson Wagonlit Travel Solutions Group in North America, noting growth in overall travel and specifically in managed travel.
"With JAL joining Oneworld, it certainly puts more pressure on Star," suggested a travel manager at a multinational organization.
"It does have an impact for us, specifically because American is pulling out of San Jose-Tokyo Narita," said Marc Casto, president and COO of Santa Clara, CA-based Casto Travel. "That service was highly requested, and JAL being in Oneworld provides clients the ability to still work within their American programs."
"From an alliance perspective, this will help all the other Oneworld members because JAL has an excellent route system into China," added Kevin Maguire, director of global travel services for Applied Materials. "But it is too early for the main players--American, BA and JAL--to tell the world they are comfortable in moving forward with corporate alliance agreements."
A Oneworld official acknowledged that the alliance must "wait until [JAL] is closer to onboard before including it in corporate sales activities."
The official added that Oneworld during 2005 "signed more contracts and generated more corporate revenue than ever before" and formalized a process to respond to requests for proposals. Most of Oneworld's recent corporate account wins have been multinational companies based in the United States, but the official noted "a number of gains" in Europe, as well.
Star Alliance and SkyTeam similarly claim growing rosters of corporate clients. Airline executives routinely point to streamlined account management, consolidated data collection and reporting, various business traveler perks, and, in some cases, unified pricing and discounting, among other benefits.
"Corporates are under pressure to find new and clever ways to take costs out of the system, and one of those ways is clearly going to be globalizing the program," said CWT's Vournakis, citing a growing appetite among corporate accounts for alliance-wide pricing and marketshare targets, as well as a general maturation of alliance programs. "The significant strides that SkyTeam has made as an alliance has really pushed the competitive environment."
But many multinational travel management professionals have said they do not see the utility of alliance-wide deals, given occasional infighting and conflicting priorities among member carriers, regulatory complexities in certain regions and entrenched, local relationships that can hinder a headquarters-driven strategy to globalize an airline program.
"We've seen some alliance programs for some corporate clients and travel management companies, but joint negotiations are not always included," Casto said. "We'd like to see more of that, but there are limitations, including antitrust issues."
Airline members, themselves, oftentimes prefer unilateral contracts with clients. "Honestly, our main focus is British Airways, and making sure we are competitive," said Robin Hayes, BA executive vice president of the Americas. "If a corporate asked us to consider a Oneworld proposal, then we would consider it where we could, but the trend is companies wanting to work globally with principals rather than with alliance groups. Some companies want to make their own decisions--using a couple of Oneworld airlines and a couple of SkyTeam airlines, for example--as part of something that makes sense for them."
"Even within the alliance, especially an alliance that does not have antitrust immunity, when it comes to corporate deals, you are basically on your own to start with," added Jack Foley, Aer Lingus executive vice president in North America.
The Aer Lingus withdrawal from Oneworld stems from strategies adopted after the company nearly collapsed at the beginning of the decade: connecting more transatlantic travelers through hubs in Ireland, offering a single-class short-haul product, using a simplified pricing structure and favoring direct Web bookings. Those approaches generally conflict with alliance participation, but the Irish carrier will continue to pursue multinational corporate business.
"With or without Oneworld, we'll still deal with the corporations we know and we'll still seek out new corporations," Foley said, citing growing corporate volumes across the Atlantic, connecting to and from a growing Aer Lingus network in Europe. The carrier's corporate relationships still may include discounts based on volume and market share, but the simplified pricing design and reduced fare levels make those discounts more modest and less of a priority. "We don't have to have a 'phony' gross fare and then offer huge discounts. The industry has migrated to a price negotiation as opposed to a service identification, especially corporations. It all became a race to the lowest, net number. We felt, 'Let's lower the fare issue so when we sit down with companies, we talk about not only the price, but more importantly, the service level and building the relationship back into corporate deals.'"
Foley also said Aer Lingus would pursue bilateral arrangements--including code shares--with "key airlines, within Oneworld and potentially outside it."
The carrier currently is developing a U.S. portal for direct corporate bookings that would emulate Aer Lingus portals now operating in European countries, and next spring plans to add new Airbus aircraft, with a "prototypical" premium product featuring lie-flat seats and updated inflight entertainment systems.
Meanwhile, Oneworld said that member carriers by early next year would consolidate their operations with JAL in Tokyo Narita Airport's Terminal 2 [Star Alliance said its member carriers completed "one the alliance's biggest co-location projects" when they joined together last week in Narita's Terminal 1].
CWT's Vournakis said the three primary alliances still have another region to tackle. "I would bet my bottom dollar that there would be an alliance with an India-based carrier within the next two years," he said.