Well it seems Skyteam is making a major attempt to take on the some of the Middle Eastern airlines as Saudi Arabian Airlines formally joins Skyteam today.
And to mark the occasion, there’s a re-brand for the airline as they change from Saudi Arabian Airlines to Saudia – not that you could tell from their website, Skyteam’s website or anywhere else for that matter.
The airline has hubs at Jeddah, Dammam and Riyadh, and adds 51 new destinations to the Skyteam map in the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian subcontinent and North Africa. This brings Skyteam to 14,500 daily flights to over 900 destinations in 173 countries.
The airline is slowly renewing itself, wanting to be a player in the core region it operates in. This also includes the dreaded re-branding exercise, improving onboard products, restructuring core-ops and modernising the fleet.
Whilst the expansion of alliances are always welcome, it looks that Skyteam (or for that matter any of the other alliances) still haven’t caught the eye of the big fish of the region. Oneworld has Royal Jordan whilst Star Alliance has Egypt Air.
This leave three big airlines – Emirates, Etihad and Qatar for alliance memberships – if they choose to sign up to an alliance…
Isn’t Etihad member of One world alliance? I recently booked/traveled on Etihad using AA miles
Nope. Eithad are alliance-free. They’ve got partnerships, but are not in any formal alliance.
Qatar has strong partnerships with many of the Star members, and I thought I saw something recently about Qatar possibly joining star….?
Etihad owns a majority if AirBerlin which joined OneWorld