Perhaps I am too simplistic, and I admit to being bamboozled by some of the lingo used by some people who are clearly in the industry on here, but I pay my money, I fly and I want to make sure that I have a choice of who I fly with which is not limited to just 3 groups of airlines.

Along with software companies and banks, airlines are one of the few commercial operations that can basically treat their customers like dirt, have exemption from all sorts of laws protecting consumers and still get away with it. Giving them more opportunity to screw us over isn’t going to be good for anyone.

Perhaps I am too simplistic, and I admit to being bamboozled by some of the lingo used by some people who are clearly in the industry on here, but I pay my money, I fly and I want to make sure that I have a choice of who I fly with which is not limited to just 3 groups of airlines.

Make them compete and take away these cozy little arrangements.

Re: “Outside of flying into Brussels, Sabena had very little route structure”

Oooh, harsh! Sabena was fantastic if you wanted to fly to, errrr, Rwanda and Congo… Think of how the Little Rock to Bujumbura market got opened up by the Qualiflyer alliance?!

LOL…perhaps I should have said, “Unless you wanted to fly into BRU, or any former Belgian Colony in BFE Africa (no pun intended)”…We all know Sabena that cornered the Tulsa to Bujumbura market!

Re: “Outside of flying into Brussels, Sabena had very little route structure”

Oooh, harsh! Sabena was fantastic if you wanted to fly to, errrr, Rwanda and Congo… Think of how the Little Rock to Bujumbura market got opened up by the Qualiflyer alliance?!

What I am saying is that ten years ago I could get a ATL-CDG flight for $600, and an ATL-BUF flight for 400. The fares are largely the same today as 1999, except that oil was at $15/bbl then and now is at $50/bbl and inflation has been about 30% over that period.

The fact is, airlines have not kept pace with inflation and non-premium passengers still can get a great bargain. Even looking at fares from Summer ’07 when the Economy was at it’s peak, fares were still at close to a historical low.

Referencing your experience with Sabena and SwissAir, the major problem with those airlines is that they really only had a few destination’s. Outside of flying into Brussels, Sabena had very little route structure. At least with AF, BA, and LH, they offer more than one destination. The small flag airlines cannot compete in an age of globalization, and that is just a function of economic evolution.

Again, for the non-premium flier, fares have not changed that much in the last ten year, and inflation adjusted have declned on many routes (and oil price adjusted, have plummeted). How alliances have impaced these prices is almost impossible to tell, given that we do not have impericle data to look at with or without alliance. But what we can say is that fares have not kept pace with airline costs.

As a high-level, revenue to enplanement is the easiest approach for we all know that capacity adjustments alone make it difficult to review something over a great period of time. Heck, Mr. Horan’s own data is quoted as being from eight years ago!

I do agree that to clean up the apple cart, a review of pure domestic US will tell one story while point-to-point international will tell another.

THEN add in which alliances were only just forming (oneworld is 10 years old) and what share of revenues migrated to that umbrella versus pure carrier traffic. It would be interesting to see the gains under the alliances away from the independent airlines and consider if that revenue is now “protected” via the alliance or lost to a competing joint-venture.