3 Links I Love: Middle East Fight Continues, Qatar Goes Italian, Lumexis Goodbye

This week’s featured link:
The Middle Carrier Fight Isn’t Dead – Twitter
If you read only BoardingArea blogs, you might think that the dispute over subsidies to Middle East carriers was over and the US carriers had lost. Post titles include terms such as “Total Loss” and “Game Over.” That isn’t true. As Ghim-Lay from FlightGlobal reports, you can’t always believe what you read from every news site. Talks are ongoing.

Links I Love

Two for the road:
Qatar Airways to buy 49 percent of Italy’s Meridiana – Reuters
Think of it this way. It’s like Etihad’s purchase of a stake in Alitalia, but worse. Like Alitalia, Meridiana does not have its house in order, and now a Middle East carrier is going to come in to “fix” it. This is somewhat uncharacteristic of Qatar, an airline that, unlike Etihad, usually invests in more profitable airlines like IAG (parent of British Airways and others) and LATAM. Qatar must really see value in the Italian market and what it can provide. I see just another broken Italian airline.

Cash-strapped Lumexis suspends some operations, seeks buyer – Runway Girl Network
I should change the name of this weekly series, because I don’t love this link. I hate it. Lumexis was a pretty innovative company when it came to inflight entertainment. It had a light weight, fast system that US Airways tested on an aircraft before others committed. They were early promoters of the “second screen” idea as well. I had to chance to see an install take place in Seattle once, and it was fascinating. But now it looks like Lumexis has hit the end of the road. That’s really unfortunate.

Brett

5 responses to “3 Links I Love: Middle East Fight Continues, Qatar Goes Italian, Lumexis Goodbye”

ABC

Jul 29, 2016

If you only read boarding area blogs, you might think a lot of things which in reality are wrong.

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Gary Leff

Jul 29, 2016

If you only read headlines, you might get a complete misunderstanding of things from the State Department. They don’t repudiate the quotes from their spokesperson which appeared in Gulf press reports.

The State Department says that the case hasn’t been formally concluded. That’s consistent with the Gulf reports, which do not say the case has been concluded but say how the case WILL BE concluded, what the outcome will be. The new State Department comments, which are a followup to State Department comments from days earlier are not repudiation of the reports in Gulf media. And they do not suggest in any way that the quotes from their spokesperson, which is all that I was basing my post on, were anything less than genuine.

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S.d.t.1982

Jul 29, 2016

I dont read the boarding area blogs, because of the informations are to different from the reality and i think also you have to look for it by yourself

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David SF eastbay

Jul 30, 2016

And we know what Cranky thinks of broken Italian airlines……LOL

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David

Jul 31, 2016

Qatar buying a significant shareholding in Meridiana seems fairly bizarre. All 7 of Meridiana’s busiest routes involve flying between Olbia on the island of Sardinia in the middle of the Mediterranean to mainland Italy. There’s also some long haul flying from mainland Italy to beach destinations. Everything else seems to be random add-ons. None of this seems to fit with the Qatar business model.

I can only assume that Meridiana will in the next 12 months start flying from lots of regional Italian cities to Doha with Italians wanting to reach Asia, in order to feed the mothership airline – similiar to Air Berlin and Etihad. This would be a significant change of strategy – not impossible to make profitable but there are some very major risks associated with such a change.

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