Aer Lingus hopes to gain access to approximately 50 new routes in the United States after agreeing a deal with giant US carrier American Airlines. The State-owned airline has obtained agreement from the US airline to "code share" on up to 50 routes.
The Irish airline is now pressing the Minister for Transport, Mr Brennan, to alter a bilateral agreement with the US to allow the routes to go ahead. Officials from his Department have been told of the American Airlines link-up and its potential.
Currently such arrangements are not permitted by the agreement, an Aer Lingus spokesman said. Mr Brennan will be dealing with the bilateral issue at EU level next month when certain countries will press for an "open skies" policy which will effectively end such bilateral accords, although the Government is intent on protecting the Shannon stopover.
Under the "code share" arrangements, a passenger could fly using a single Aer Lingus ticket to one of the 50 US destinations, even though part or all of their journey would involve an American Airlines aircraft.
The advantage of code share arrangements from the passengers' perspective is they can access destinations with one ticket and do not have to pay for two separate flights. In most cases, check-in and baggage are taken care off at the airport where the passenger first departs.
By entering into code share agreements, carriers do not have to cover every route to benefit from the volume of passengers. That is the major advantage to Aer Lingus, which does not have the capacity to service so many routes.
Aer Lingus has maintained for some time that changing the bilateral would give it a chance to exploit a large range of US destinations. It believes there is a large untapped market of tourists interested in coming to the Republic, who do not necessarily live near the five airports currently served by the airline.
Meanwhile, Air France said yesterday that Dutch airline KLM would make a decision shortly about joining the SkyTeam airline alliance.
Air France chairman Mr Jean-Cyril Spinetta made the remarks at a news conference at which the alliance announced a strengthening of its transatlantic co-operation, generating $100 million (€85.5 million) per year for the next three years in additional revenue for its four European and US members - Air France, Delta, Alitalia and Aeromexico.
Mr Spinetta also said SkyTeam was beginning to study a common airline purchasing agreement.
In another aviation development, Virgin Atlantic and British Midland (which trades as bmi)confirmed they had held talks on co-operation, although both rejected speculation of an imminent merger. Virgin said talks were taking place but that "no definitive conclusions" had been reached over possible co-operation in areas such as code sharing and facilities. - (Additional reporting, Reuters)
