Codeshare Woes

Nikolaj gets left without overseas wifi because of codesharing:

I’ll be heading stateside early October, hopefully with a visit to O’Reilly’s Web2.0 conference. Ticket booking was a bit hurried yesterday but I opted for SAS due to inflight Wi-Fi and because the price was right. Today I checked the actual itenary and of course, the first leg to the US is operated as codeshare flight in cooperation with United Airlines. No ip - this is outright deceitful to geeks like me.

Edward Hasbrouck has an excellent article on the subject, Airline alliances and code-sharing, where he writes, in part:

Airlines claim code sharing and alliances enable them to offer better services like through ticketing, baggage transfers, and frequent flyer mileage credits between alliance partners. But that’s a lie. None of those services requires alliances or code sharing. The international standards that the airlines themselves established decades ago through IATA permit all IATA member airlines, not just alliance partners, to publish through fares and establish interline ticketing and baggage transfer agreements. Any IATA-appointed travel agency can sell tickets on any IATA airline, including tickets at a single through fare for a multi-airline journey. And even alliance members often give frequent flyer mileage credit for travel on non-alliance airlines, without code sharing.

Code sharing is unnecessary for, indeed irrelevant to, any legitimate purpose or actual service. Code sharing doesn’t enable an airline to fly to any more places. It just enables the airline to mislead travellers into thinking that they fly to places they don’t. I call that fraud.