Emirates: the Lone Ranger
Over the last 15 years, airlines had developed a system of airline alliances and commercial cooperation agreements to increase network service. These “codeshare” routes allowed airlines to feed into each other’s hubs and split costs and revenues without directly increasing their own capacity. Three distinct alliances had emerged: the Star Alliance, the SkyTeam Alliance, and the oneworld Alliance, which together comprised some 84% of global aviation traffic. (See Exhibit 18 for a full list of members and market share data.) Most major airlines were either aligned or affiliated with one of the three alliances; those who weren’t tended to be in emerging markets or were low-cost carriers.
Within the Middle East, Qatar Airways and Turkish Airlines were part of the oneworld and Star Alliances, respectively, and Etihad had recently announced an “extensive partnership” with AirFrance/KLM, part of the SkyTeam alliance. Only Emirates had far refrained from joining an alliance, viewing these organizations as inherently bureaucratic and a constraint to network growth. President Tim Clark had likened the alliance systems to gang warfare, noting that “[Alliances] distort and channel and direct for the greater good of the alliance thing, rather than the consumers that are driving it all. You can’t allow yourself to be subjected to the whims of an amorphous board, like the Star Alliance, saying ‘you can’t do this, you can’t do that; you’ve got to buy this airplane; you’ve got to fly this route.’ Not in the world as it is today. We want to move rapidly where we have opportunities.”
To compensate for the influx of out-of-network passengers that alliances brought, Emirates relied on a series of bilateral codeshares to reach geographical frontier markets and feed its network. (See Appendix A for additional information on two key codeshare partners, Qantas and JetBlue.) Adnan Kazim noted, “Passengers still want to go onto secondary cities that they can’t access [through our network]. We look at the market and passenger data to see where passengers are ultimately traveling to and from. Then, if we can’t directly service it, we look to complement it through partners. The big advantage for passengers is their baggage is checked directly through, and they receive a preferential fare through their partner to a city like Chicago.” On the other side of the Pacific, the codeshare between Emirates and Qantas allowed Emirates passengers to connect to over 55 Australian destinations, many of which would have otherwise been too small for Emirates to directly serve.
As Emirates looked toward the future, it needed to reevaluate these relationships: Should they continue, or should the airline enter the newest markets on its own?