Etihad Airways heralded a successful first year of its equity alliance strategy, after a financial reporting season which saw each of the five airlines within the alliance - Airberlin, Air Seychelles, Virgin Australia, Aer Lingus and Etihad Airways - announce profitable performance.
The airlines' individual and collective results were boosted by a number of measures, including growing code-share traffic between their networks, successful joint sales and marketing efforts, and a range of increasing business and cost synergies. James Hogan, Etihad Airways' President and Chief Executive Officer, welcomed the success of the airlines. He said: "The 2012 was a year in which the global economy remained very tough and in which airline industry profits as a whole shrank, for the second successive year. Yet each of the airlines in our equity alliance showed strong financial performance with each reporting a profit."
Etihad Airways' equity alliance model has seen increasing cooperation with each of its equity investment airlines. It has code-share relationships in place with each of the other four airlines, adding to its 38 other code-shares around the world, which together delivered more than 1.2 million passengers onto the virtual network. Airberlin, Virgin Australia and Air Seychelles have also already launched new services to Abu Dhabi from their respective markets.
Hogan said: "When we took the first steps on this strategy, with our investment in Airberlin, we described it as a game-changer. I am pleased to see that it has changed the game, not just for Etihad Airways but for each of our partners. These are strong and strengthening businesses, which have outperformed the global market and their own regional markets in 2012.-PR
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