Swiss sees benefits of oneworld tie-up

Thursday, 10 Oct, 2003 0

Business travellers from the north of England should see benefits now Swiss has joined the oneworld alliance, its UK boss Richard Castle has claimed.

Mr Castle, who is general manager UK, Ireland, Scandinavia & Finland told TravelMole that previously the alliance – whose other members include Aer Lingus, American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Finnair, Iberia, LanChile and Qantas – did not have a central European hub. He claimed that the fact that it could not add Zurich to its hub airports meant that travellers from the North now had an alternative to connecting via Heathrow.

But Swiss was also benefiting from joining oneworld, he said. He told TravelMole: “It makes a big difference to us. It gives us credibility .There have been questions about our viability and from a confidence point of view it sends out a strong message.”

Mr Castle also clarified the airline’s recent announcement that it was going to follow a ‘low cost’ model. He said there would not be fares to rival easyJet or Ryanair for example, explaining: “They are lower fares but no lower than what BA or anyone else is doing. it’s nothing more than that.”

The airline has recently started to charge for food in economy, but he said this did not mean the experience was “no frills”. He claimed: “There’s no way the food is low quality. What would you rather have a not very good sandwich for free or a large range of high quality food?”

However he admitted that customers who had bought a BA ticket only to find they were on a Swiss flight and had to pay for their food might be less than pleased. He said: “Consistency will be an issue if we are honest about that.”

Part of following a low cost way of doing things also meant selling more tickets on the web, he said. Currently less than 5% of the airline’s tickets are sold this way. Mr Castle commented: “We want to be low cost, we want to have low fares and have a low cost base. Part of the model is to sell more on the web and we are trying to do that.”