South America’s largest airline LATAM will leave the oneworld alliance as part of a surprise deal announced this morning that will see the SkyTeam member Delta take a 20% stake in the airline.
LATAM and Delta will cooperate on routes but LATAM hasn’t decided yet whether to join SkyTeam.
This will leave a big hole in oneworld’s network, which has no other members based in South America.
It’s not yet clear how this will affect Qantas’ partnership with LATAM. The airlines cooperate as alliance members, including by codesharing on each other’s networks and giving frequent flyers reciprocal benefits.
Some form of the existing arrangement can continue, of course. Qantas partners with airlines that aren’t in the oneworld alliance, including several SkyTeam members in which Delta also has a minority stake.
Stay tuned for more information as it comes to hand!
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This is the game that CEO of DL has been doing, bringing everyone on board to fight against the Gulf carriers (mainly for QR) to weak them up and start to buy investment in other airlines as QR has been doing… not only weaken QR is also weaken US carriers for them to take the lead. This strong hit by DL to AA it has been a big one that I hope AA will recover that market with something. LA played the “whore” role here to the best offer… because QR have had about 10% of it not making it big enough to fight for the alliance. DL was in charge to damage the image of QR enough to cause them the biggest loses in the history and not allowing them to compete and buy more stake in other airlines, because many people are afraid of QR now and start to hate the gulf carriers when they really revamp the luxury of travel, otherwise we would be eating crackers on 15 hours flight starting with DL who was the worst of all top three big US airlines at international level. By the way there has been a big rumor of DL being a big supporter from Trump government getting more deals that anyone else in US airlines history.