Air Cananda and United Airlines have had their plan for a joint business agreement allowing them to share revenue and passengers agreed on all bar 14 routes by the Canadian Competition Bureau.
The bureau said the agreement would “protect and preserve competition” on the 14 key, high demand routes between Canada and the U.S. The reasoning is that on these 14 routes.
On those routes, the carriers will be prohibited from coordinating prices, number of seats available at each price, pooling revenue or costs, or otherwise sharing commercially sensitive information.
So the routes that are excluded are:
- Calgary/Chicago
- Calgary/Houston
- Calgary/San Francisco
- Montreal/Chicago
- Montreal/Houston
- Montreal/Washington
- Ottawa/Washington
- Ottawa/New York
- Toronto/Cleveland
- Toronto/Denver
- Toronto/Houston
- Toronto/San Francisco
- Toronto/Washington
- Vancouver/San Francisco
All other routes will fall into the JBV allowing pooling of resources, cost savings and all the things that airlines love when it comes to saving money.
Air Canada says:
This agreement re-confirms that the long-standing alliance relationship between Air Canada and United which has provided more efficient and convenient service to customers will continue to be conducted in accordance with all applicable laws.
It’s a useful addition to the two companies, and on some of those routes where Air Canada/United have near total domination, the regulator is trying to keep competition alive. The fact that airlines seem to move fares in total unison is besides the point…
If you thought it was expensive to fly between the US and Canada now….you ain’t seen nothing yet. Agreements of this type have done nothing but bring higher prices to consumers. Just compare USA to Europe fares today with a few years ago
I thought code-sharing was supposed to “allow pooling of resources, cost savings and all the things that airlines love when it comes to saving money” and “provide more efficient and convenient service to customers”.
Codesharing allows airline flightcodes to be placed on other airlines (so AA99 can be sold as BA1450 for example) Joint Business Ventures allow pooling of flightcodes and selling the flights together (for Example the AA/BA/IB JV across the pond, the Star Alliance JV, etc etc etc).
Or to put it another way: a way to control fares…