Record alliance revenues for oneworld

06 June 2011

oneworld® alliance revenues reached record levels last year, at more than US$850 million - experiencing their fastest growth since the premier alliance was launched more than a decade ago.

Revenues from oneworld alliance fares, corporate contracts and other alliance sales activity grew year-on-year by 34 per cent in 2010 - during a period when its member airlines' combined overall passenger revenues grew 2 per cent, to US$57 billion.

Revenues from corporate contracts - sales deals with multinationals involving at least seven oneworld member airlines - more than doubled, with more and more international businesses seeking deals with alliances rather than with individual airlines. 

Interline revenues within oneworld - money generated by the 8 million passengers transferring in 2010 to one of the alliance's member airlines from another - also reached their pre-recession levels, at US$2.2 billion, up 17 per cent year-on-year.  For some of its member airlines, these oneworld interline revenues accounted for more than 10 per cent of their revenues from their overall passenger activities - a record contribution for the alliance.

The record rise in revenues caps a breakthrough year for oneworld with:

  • The addition of S7 Airlines, Russia's leading domestic carrier, in December.
  • The signing of India's leading carrier Kingfisher Airlines and Europe's fifth biggest airline airberlin as members elect, to join in early 2012.
  • The launch of a transatlantic joint business between American Airlines, British Airways and Iberia after gaining long-awaited anti-trust immunity in both the USA and Europe.
  • Approval from authorities in both the USA and Japan for a joint business between American Airlines and Japan Airlines (JAL) covering their services North America and Asia, launched on 1 April 2011, following JAL's reaffirmation of its oneworld membership earlier in 2010 and its deepening of co-operation with its oneworld partners.
  • British Airways and Iberia concluding their merger agreement, completed in early 2011.
  • LAN Airlines celebrating its 10th anniversary as a oneworld member.
  • The appointment of industry veteran Bruce Ashby as the new oneworld CEO.
  • A decision taken to move the alliance's head office from Vancouver to the heart of the world's single biggest air travel market, New York, on track for completion in the coming months.
  • oneworld adding both the Global Traveler GT Tested 2010 Awards" Best Airline Alliance and World Airline Awards' World's Best Alliance titles to the World Travel Awards' World's Leading Airline Alliance trophies it has won for the past eight years, giving it three of the four leading international awards for airline alliances.

oneworld is the world's premier global airline alliance for business travellers.  It brings together some of the best and biggest names in the airline business - American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Finnair, Iberia, Japan Airlines, LAN, Malév Hungarian Airlines, Mexicana, Qantas, Royal Jordanian and S7 Airlines, and around 20 affiliates including American Eagle, Dragonair, LAN Argentina, LAN Ecuador and LAN Peru.  . 

oneworld enables its members to offer their customers more services and benefits than any airline can provide on its own.  These include a broader route network, opportunities to earn and redeem frequent flyer miles and points across the combined oneworld network and more airport lounges.   oneworld also offers more alliance fares than any of its competitors. 

With Kingfisher Airlines and airberlin - which are on track to join early next year - its member airlines carried 342 million passengers in 2010 on a combined fleet of more than 2,500 aircraft.  They today serve almost 900 airports in 150 countries with some 9,500 daily departures and offer their premium passengers access to more than 550 airport lounges.

The alliance's latest results were revealed as the Chief Executives of its member airlines met in Singapore for their mid-year oneworld Governing Board session, on the fringes of the International Air Transport Association's (IATA) world air transport summit.

oneworld CEO Bruce Ashby said: "The results from the past year make abundantly clear the growing value oneworld represents to all its key stakeholders.  In an industry where profit margins are thin at best, revenues and cost savings from oneworld make an increasingly important contribution to our member airlines' financial standings. 

"Revenues earned by our member airlines from their oneworld activities have shown remarkable resilience to the recession, bouncing back reassuringly rapidly and robustly from the global downturn.

"For frequent, international business travellers - our core target market - alliance services and benefits are now clearly a ‘must have', so oneworld's customer offering has never been more important in terms of keeping our member airlines competitive and their customers satisfied."