Why does code-sharing exist with the airlines?
If you book a long-distance flight then chances are you’ll find that the airline you’re actually flying on isn’t the airline that’s listed on your ticket. For instance, a flight from Barclona to Sydney on Lufthansa is, at best, only Lufthansa from Barcelona to Frankfurt and from there it’ll be on Singapore Airlines. Why?
The reasons for this go way back into the past when there were “national airlines” and bilateral arrangements were negotiated on their behalf by the various governments. For example, at one time you could only fly between America and Britain on British Airways or American Airlines and that remained the case for many years which, of course, led to all of us paying much higher fares than we really needed to.
Within Europe many of these restrictions have been killed off by the European Commission who regard competition as a “good thing” and so it is. The discount airline Ryanair could never have gotten off the ground had the old-time restrictions remained in place. One effect of those restrictions was that, since it’s an Irish airline, it could only have flown between France and Ireland yet in many of the airports that it uses it flies from, say, France to Belgium, Germany, etc.
But what about code-sharing? Well, that exists to get around those old-time restrictions which also ruled out cross-border purchases of airlines. The relatively recent AirFrance/KLM merger could never have happened even 10 years earlier and even now it’s not possible for a foreign airline to buy any American owned airlines (so much for America promoting competition, eh?).
With code-sharing airlines are effectively able to operate as one without requiring to merge as such. Singapore Airlines would probably like to buy Lufthansa for its European routes but can’t do so at the moment so instead there’s code-sharing.
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