http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16298167

Is this likely to mean the end of SWISS codesharing and the reasonably price flights to UK?

Though if it does, it might mean the return of BSL-LCY.

It first of all is the death of what has been with slightly different names BRITISH MIDLAND AIRWAYS, and terminates what started in 1964

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/compa...y-History.html

The name British Midland may be retained for whatever, but all operations now purchased by IAG (BA-IB) will be OneWorld and no longer StarAlliance. StarAlliance has that way lost a leg in Britain. Whether the routes in question are to survive under the IAG lead is something I do NOT know. I would have preferred to see British Midland being taken over by Virgin Atlantic. I can imagine Virgin to become the StarAlliance link into Britain. Interesting will be to see what happens with FlyBe

But Virgin is a longhaul airline, and becoming part of Star Alliance wouldn't really bring much value to the network. London is well-served by foreign carriers -- there are very few destinations served by Virgin that you can't reach easily with other carriers. And for connecting traffic within Europe, there are already *A flights from most cities direct into London.

I'm a big fan of BA, and if these extra slots mean they can squeeze in a new mid-morning LHR-BSL flight for connecting traffic, I would be delighted. While BA dominance may not be great news for UK-based travellers, for those of us living in Europe it gives better access to the BA network. At least here in Switzerland, BA are competing heavily against LH/LX and are offering some of the best fares in the market. Our corporate deal with BA means that long-haul business class tickets are often half the fare on LH/LX.

I will miss BD's generous frequent flyer program, though. One of the easiest *G cards to get, and great redemption options.

I doubt there will be a single change for Swiss flights, the code sharing was just marketing at work. It's actually good news for the Star alliance, British Midland was a drain on Lufthansa's resources and not part of their European strategy. In the end, it was all about the Heathrow slots rather than the actual airline that made it a decent deal for BA. I'm not sure how far this case should be examined by the monopolies commission, it gives BA such a chunk of slots at LHR, that it genuinely stifles the competition.

Let's see how Virgin react and what Lufthansa's strategy will be now that they have managed to lose their unwanted cousin.

Virgin Atlantic Airways, according to Richard Branson, would have liked to get British Midland Airways as its intra-British/intra-European feeder for its long-haul operations. And, have a look into THIS link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Atlantic_Airways
where you can see that Singapore Airlines owns 49% of Virgin Atlantic Airways. Singapore Airlines is a member of the Star Alliance, so that a linkage already IS existing. Complicated may be the tariff-structures. For instance, in case Swiss International Airlines takes a Virgin passenger to London, there are three questions -- A) what is the interline-net-rate for the ZRH-LON-leg -- B) what is the sales-rate --C) who pays what for the intra-London transfer. But again, would Virgin in the end get into FlyBe and use that carrier as regional feeder, FlyBe might be of interest to Star Alliance in general and to the Lufthansa-Group (which includes Swiss International Airlines and Austrian Airlines)

Finally, in light of this above, the LH decision to sell to IAG was not necessarily an "anti-VirginAtlantic" decision, as British Midland Airways
had become a loss-making enterprise, and the experts at Lufthansa apparently regarded it as a hopeless case. I cannot tell you what the folks of LH and Virgin really talked about in the past three weeks. Might be most interesting to know

I cannot tell you what LH will do next, what I however CAN say is that those "Lufthanseaten" over the past 56 years have shown a disturbing habit to be generally right

Guess that's why they were so worried about Emrats and Qatar to the extent that they had to plant their own spies to get the "inside line" .....

I can well imagine that some Lufthanseaten got alarmed out of their beds by the new EtihadAirways-AirBerlin linkage. It is obvious that EK and QR now will look out for their own Germany link, with LH trying to do whatever possible to prevent whatever the two may develop .