US airlines omit to mention all the details

New York: In the row between Gulf and US airlines over accepting government subsidies, the latest accusations are levelled and dismissed with equal precision, efficiency and astonishing speed. That’s not surprising; these are airlines, after all.

But the haste has allowed American Airlines to conveniently ignore a little-known fact: its partnership with adversaries Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways remains strong, and is in fact growing.

That’s right — while its executives join their counterparts from Delta Air Lines and United Airlines in launching accusations at Gulf carriers, American is now sending more of its own passengers on Etihad’s planes. The airlines had announced an expanded codeshare agreement that will see American sell tickets on Etihad’s flights from Abu Dhabi to Dallas and San Francisco, and allow Etihad to book passengers on American’s flights from Dallas to nine US cities.

American has similar agreements with Qatar on flights to and from Doha.

If you can’t beat them, join them ... That’s what American’s strategy seems to be, and they aren’t the least bit concerned by the hypocrisy of it all. Why should they be? Leisure travellers book on price alone, oblivious to numb limbs and blurry eyes, let alone which airline is operating their flight or which one is accusing a competitor of accepting subsidies or even associating with terrorists.

Business travellers, already accustomed to the superior service in the front cabins of the Gulf carriers, will be happy that they can now collect frequent flyer miles on more of those flights thanks to the expanded code-sharing. Even Etihad and Qatar aren’t likely to raise a fuss, since they are selling more tickets too.

The US government, however, is where American will encounter turbulence. Sure, the Transportation Department said it will review the subsidy allegations, but it is already of the opinion that the open-skies policy “has greatly benefited the travelling public, the US aviation industry, American cities and the broader US economy.”

Add that to the fact that even the airline industry’s own lobbying group refuses to support the accusations and things look bleak for the US carriers.

The result is that American’s hypocritical stance on code-sharing, if it ever enters the debate, probably won’t matter much. But that’s a shame. Codesharing agreements provide the exact sort of freedom that open-skies treaties are designed to protect.

American’s customers have access to more of the world thanks to Etihad and Qatar, and vice versa. That means more business deals and family reunions. And let’s not forget American’s investors: if part of your business strategy is sending customers on someone else’s planes, you’d better have a good way to replace the money you’ll lose from taking those planes out of the sky.

— The writer is graduate student at New York University’s Aurthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.