Virgin may team up with Lufthansa
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Virgin Atlantic Airways has said that it may seek closer ties to other carriers, including German national carrier Lufthansa, if British Airways wins approval for a trans-Atlantic alliance with American Airlines. Bloomberg reported Virgin Atlantic’s Chief Executive Officer, Steve Ridgway, as saying that such a move would be necessary to counter BA-AA’s potential dominance of the lucrative trans-Atlantic market.
“We know that Lufthansa now owns BMI and it would make a lot of sense to work more closely,” Ridgeway. The BA- AMR pact “would make the landscape much tougher and make competition much tougher”, he added.
Lufthansa is “investigating options for future collaborations” and hasn’t made any decisions, said Claudia Lange, a spokesperson for the carrier.
Meanwhile, the BBC reported Ridgeway as saying that Virgin Atlantic is already at a competitive disadvantage at London’s Heathrow airport. “We don’t have plenty of slots, we have been at Heathrow now for almost 20 years and we still have less than 3% of slots at Heathrow, so we are still a minnow in that sense,” Ridgway was quoted saying. “We are not able to compete effectively,” he added.
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