Could Condor Be Acquired By A Major Airline, Join An Alliance?

Does Germany allow foreign ownership? Could Alaska buy it?

How would this do anything to give Condor more feed at a German gateway, be it Frankfurt or some other airport? i dont think it would do a thing.

They could be acquainted by Lufthansa, your favorite airline!

Has to be majority owned and controlled by an EU entity.

it appears this is just a speculative article rather than based on any news.

Condor's lack of being attractive to the alliances is that it is or was designed to be a low cost carrier. LCCs are less attractive to alliances.

Condor could change its business model.

and IAG or any alliance isn't going to help provide feed to Condor other than the flights which already exist and might provide additional connecting opportunities.

being in an alliance could provide Condor w/ feed on its flights to other markets such as the US if they operate flights to/from alliance partner hubs.

Purchased a one way ticket two days in advanced for $200 from JFK to Germany last week. The a330 neo was a little tight but still great experience and connection easy in Frankfurt. While March is low season for Europe, that fare rivals the old Wow and Norwegian days (epically 2 days in advanced)…can’t imagine margins are great. Anyone who’d acquire them would likely just absorb the assets and reduce the competition, and my ability for cheap last minute trips 🙁

I could see IAG owning Condor and operating them in a similar fashion to Aer Lingus or even Level. Maybe add a vueling hub in Frankfurt or operate out of a different airport like Aer Lingus’s Manchester transatlantic operations.

For example BER, DUS, HAM to JFK, LAX, MIA and SFO plus a Caribbean destination to cater to underserved large German cities.

"Could there be merit to Condor moving its hub to another German airport with less competition, near a larger population center, like Berlin, which has for years been sort of neglected by Lufthansa?"

That worked well for airberlin. Assuming they ever did that, what would they have to do to in order to avoid airberlin's fate?

I’d say that Condor’s business model is very similar to Aer Lingus. Would be a very good fit for an alliance.

@ Julia -- In fairness, part of airberlin's issue was actually that it couldn't fully expand to Berlin due to the delay with the new airport, and instead, most long haul service was out of Dusseldorf.

@ Jason -- It wouldn't give Condor more feed, but it would help the airline in many other ways. For one, the airline could get more passenger traffic due to being associated with an alliance. If part of a joint venture, Condor could also get more lucrative traffic. But more than anything, Condor being part of a larger airline group would allow the airline to develop a more cohesive strategy. At the moment, Condor is just kind of in limbo, as it continues to be reliant on Lufthansa, which isn't sustainable long term.

Where would this traffic come from? Even if it's part of one world or the joint venture between AA and BA, traffic isn't going to just magically appear. Not sure what you mean with that assertion.
The fact is, regardless of where they are in Germany, without fees from somebody, they won't have traffic just appear. It won't happen at Frankfurt, it won't happen at happen at Berlin, it won't happen at Düsseldorf, or anywhere else. That's just not how it works.

While people generally do rarely travel to Germany .... germans travel a lot so that should work too.

Timbits, you're just miffed because Ben didn't recommend that Condor join DieTeam to have a huggy-wuggy fest with your beloved Delta.

Aer Lingus has no hometown longhaul competitor. Condor does.

ORD,
the same principle applies to SkyTeam as it does for IAG. Condor is still a low cost carrier that needs feed in Germany.
Getting feed on one of the flight from either AA or DL could help but that only helps on one end of the flight

again, this article seems nothing more than speculation on Ben's part.

I fail to see the point of buying Condor instead of just opening new bases by the existing airlines within IAG where they make sense. Condor is very much a leisure/charter airline, whereas IAG needs a proper network carrier in continental Europe. So even if they buy Condor, they will need to completely restructure the network. So why pay for Condor instead of just opening the bases they need under the IB AOC?

Germany is a member state of the EU. Foreign ownership (e.g. Alaska) would generally mean a loss of EU traffic rights.

While indeed the Ministry of Transport in Germany suggested that Condor or TUI should team-up with Oneworld or Skyteam to increase competition in Germany, i simply don't see why OW has to gain from buying Condor.

Condor doesn't have a strong domestic market and at its core is really just a leisure airline.
Well, AA could connect its passengers via Frankfurt to a bunch of holiday destinations but they would also do the same through Iberia.

I'm struggling to see the benefit here. Condor would have to massively increase its domestic presence in Germany and say Zürich.

They’re not, or were not, designed to be a LCC. They were designed to go to destinations that LH didn’t go to.
Their business class product is actually very good, beats most European, and all American competitors.
What they did do was rely on LH feeding them connecting traffic until the end of their days. That obviously changed.
I do believe that they could very well function similarly to EI.

Yes of course the article is speculation. It essentially says exactly that. It's musing on what a future takeover could look like. Hope that helps.

Moving to Berlin?
You have far more people(and richer people) living in driving distance to Frankfurt than you have around Berlin.
Berlin itself has 4million inhabitants but that is it pretty much.

Germanys population centers are in the south and west. And Frankfurt happens to be perfectly situated to capture both Baden Württemberg(the part that is not covered by Zurich) and North-Rhine Westphalia as well as obviously Hesse and Rheinland-Pfalz.
These are some 40million inhabitants.

It could potentially make sense to establish a larger presence in say Stuttgart, but there you have Zurich as a major airport to the south and you would lose some traffic from North Rhine Westphalia.

I mean there is a reason why Berlin is no hub airport, apart from history and negligence by Lufthansa.

The south has both more people and offers higher yields thanks to business travel by Auto and machine industry as well as by finance in Frankfurt.

@Julia It was largely the fiasco delay of BER which killed airBerlin.
Remember that in 2012 the opening was pulled at only 4 weeks notice, and it took another 8 years to open.
TXL did not have the capacity for airBerlin to expand.
There is now plenty of capacity at BER.

LH not flying from Berlin to any of London, Paris, Rome or Madrid has always struck me as odd.

When German civil servants need to go to those cities do they fly BA/Air France/Iberia?
Or Easyjet/Ryanair/Wizzair?
Or change in FRA/MUC?

They could fly private with government planes if enough people need to get there. Otherwise they are in principle allowed to fly with foreign airlines, but there is also Eurowings with a huge Berlin presence.
Changing in Frankfurt or Munich does happen as well, it really depends.

IAG interested in Condor?

Years ago, British Airways operated in Germany as Deutsche BA. It didn't work.

Eurowings also offer elite benefits to M&M status holders, so they're probably the most popular choice for those who travel with any frequency.

Surely with all the "Nett hier" stickers tourists should be flocking to Baden Württemberg by now!

Outside of the existing Lufthansa hubs, DUS is the only airport in the Republic which could sustain a hub operation as it's got both lots of people in the catchment area (not just in NRW and Bremen, but all the way to at least Liege and Eindhoven) and, unlike Berlin, a substantial amount of traffic which is relatively price-insensitive (whether it's business travellers paying for business class to the USA or families prepared to shell out hundreds for a Y flight timed to maximise time with the kids' grandparents in the Balkans/Turkey).

I would love to see Condor joining forces with LOT, but any sale to AFKL or IAG would be catastrophic for competition. Europe needs a fourth network carrier group in order to avoid ending up with a US-style cartel. If and when such a group gets formed, I am sure it'd be able to work within any of the alliances.

I don't see any value in a being a weak second at FRA.

I would like for Condor, under IAG ownership and Oneworld, to shift its assets to and hub at Dusseldorf. Good business presence, large population and catchment area. DUS also also shown that it can sustain a hub before.

Frankfurt is centrally located in Germany and most importantly has excellent rail connections. Condor and Lufthansa both sell rail connections and you can reach the majority of Germany within a few hours. There is no other airport in Germany that offers such strong rail connections. Condor can't leave Frankfurt.

I get how joining an alliance would benefit Condor... but how would an alliance benefit from Condor joining?

I flew them twice on a transatlantic in business; compared to my experiences with SN and LH in business, they are much much better !
So giving how Miles&More is treating his members lately, I guess I'll be very interested to see which partnership they can make, 'cause I'll certainly choose them again if I want to go oversea again !

What does Condor bring to the table to anyone ?

Slots at FRA? Leisure flights to Whitehorse ?

As long as they don't become good on a certain desirable market segment that bigger airlines fail at no one will put a penny in.

Look at the airlines that are considered for purchase: they serve desirable touristic countries (ITA, and Air Europa) and/or have brand recognition and operations in specific market segments that are considered growth opportunities by other airlines (Hispanophone America for Europa, Africa, Brazil...) or they have particularly efficient operations and can give access to cheap workforce and feeder traffic (Air Baltic).

Condor has none of those

Level previously operated short-haul bases in Vienna and Amsterdam, and for a brief time, even offered long-haul flights from Paris Orly. Though the experiment was short-lived, it highlights IAG's ambition to capture a slice of the leisure long-haul market in hubs dominated by SkyTeam and Star Alliance. Acquiring Condor would undoubtedly help achieve this goal.

The business case for investing in ITA would not have existed had it not been for the risk of a rival snapping up an additional couple of well-placed hubs and a stronger foothold in a large market.

The operations of Condor are probably more valuable- working with an airline which is more focused on business travel (e.g. LOT, Finnair) and/or Asian destinations (e.g. THY) could generate decent synergies.

No it hasn't. Any (longhaul) airline that's tried to hub at Dusseldorf, has either dismantled the operation or gone out of business.

LH would immediately these routes from Berlin to London, Paris, Rome,... if a competitor appeared.

We've seen that before when there was Air Berlin, for example.

@Ben, can you expand a bit on "[LOT has] second class status within Star Alliance"?

I flew Condor last year in their premium economy product, and it was wonderful. Those neo planes are very comfortable.
I don’t mind having to connect through Frankfurt because that’s what you essentially pretty much do with Lufthansa so it wasn’t a problem

It would be a great up sell if flying Condor Business to get a business class seat on Lufthansa on your onward journey

It’s correct to say that Germany is not a huge leisure destination (versus IAG hotspots the UK and Spain), but it’s a huge leisure travel origin market.

There’s got to be a way to marry that demand with Condor’s and IAG’s existing infrastructure without a lot of change to either.