Official: Lufthansa To Take Over 40 Airberlin Planes

@lucky- Since you have been talking about new routes in your recent posts, what do you feel about American Airlines new service to Seoul and Barcelona from Chicago?

I see another strike by LH & AB looming on the horizon. Somebody's gonna get their feelings hurt over this acquisition...

I certainly hope the plan will work, if not there will be an LHGroup monopoly on even more routes. And what a monopoly means you can look up in any microeconomics textbook. So in that sense I wish AB all the success.

But I'm sceptical, I must admit. AB deficits are NOT because of being successless on the market or more generally the revenue side. Payloads are very high, on average in the high 80s, which means many flights sold out. Fares are not paricularly low, neither. So revenue is may be not great, but quite ok.

The trouble is on the cost side, in particular poor lease terms, high pension liabilies in some parts (not Belair and NIki, but legacy LTU and AB), poorly timed fuel hedges, poor fleet strategy (mixed A320 and 737 on a permanent basis), etc.

Now does the new strategy address the cost side? Well, the network carrier part doesn't. The holiday flight business line might, if it can be sold at a reasonable price (that's the plan, in negotiations with TUI). The wet lease to LHGroup is sort of a "take the loss at one" deal. LH is unlikely to pay the high AB lease terms, but at least the will pay a fixed amount of money which will allow AB to realize the write off at once under the new IFRS 16. So bottom line, we are likely to see a huge write off in 2016 and then a slightly improved expense situation in the future. But, at least the lease of their long haul flight and ex-LTU staf cost will remain.

So it might work, if TATL traffic will develop ok and so does the network traffic in Europe. But neither one is certain.

"Want to get away from holiday travel focus" and yet 3 of their non-stops to the US are Miami, Orlando, and Fort Myers, Florida..... Fort Myers !

Non-stops to WAS,CLT, PHL, and/or DFW would make sense for business travel. They should be getting feeders from AA the same way Lufthansa gets feeders from United. Abandoning that function to BA is stupid. Many people would prefer not to deal with LHR.

@tassojunior - There's a phenomenon in the Florida leisure market where some European nationalities tend to congregate in certain areas, and Fort Myers and the surrounding beach areas are particularly popular with German travelers. Fort Myers lets AB get a good chunk of that German business from a central location, much better positioned than TPA. (And TPA's had LH for about a year now.) Surprisingly, unless they want to completely abandon the leisure market, RSW is a really good choice for them.

I wonder if this means that the routes that are sold off will continue to bear AB codeshare flight numbers?

Not quite related to the content of this post, but: any thoughts on why Airberlin seems to only be offering economy-class seats for American Airlines' Aadvantage awards from Europe to the U.S.? It seems next to impossible to book their (really great!) business class product using Aadvantage points.. any advice you might have on this would be really appreciated!

a comment on Lufthansa - I recently paid over $13k for the LAX - Frankfurt 1st class route since I never saw mileage redemption availability. Anyway, everything was great with Lufthansa - service, seat, Frankfurt's 1st class terminal. Superb.

Except - I had so looked forward to the Rimowa amenity kit. It was not given or available on either leg of my journey. Instead, I was given a Jacob Jensen kit, which was not nice. Didn't even bother to keep it. Bummer.