Christian Klick, Star Alliance vice president, corporate
office, was recently in Los Angeles to help celebrate the airline
network’s 10th anniversary. He was one of the original executives
when the group was founded in 1997.
Why should travel agents and tour operators think of
booking through Star Alliance?
It’s one stop shopping if you want to give your clients good
advice about making easy connections. Today’s customers are
traveling around the world. They are no longer traveling to just
one destination. Think of globalization and the business traveler.
One minute they have to be in China, the next in Europe, so they
have to travel all over the place. There is no airline that can do
this just by itself. And this is the reason why 10 years ago we
started Star Alliance. We recognized that the growing demand for
global travel cannot be served by one single airline. And customers
told us, “Give us the connections which we need to make our
business work.” And that’s why the airlines came together
originally only five and currently 17 and next year 20. If you
advise a customer to stay within that network, he’ll be taken care
of wherever he travels. And he remains a strong customer of his own
airline and gets the benefits of his own airline wherever he
travels in the world.
So I can book once all the way through?
Exactly, and if you’re talking to your friends at United, they
will be able to not just offer you the United network, but the
network of 17 airlines with 855 destinations all around the world.
And they’ll be able to connect you with all the other airlines in
the Star Alliance.
How about frequent flier miles? For example, if I’m
flying on United, are the miles I accumulate on another Star
Alliance airline applicable to my United account?
Well, it’s twofold. Yes, they count, but not only for your
mileage account. They also count for your status. For example, if
you want to be a 1K on United and you’re traveling on Asiana, it
still counts toward your United 1K account. And that’s something
that other airlines can’t offer you. They have copied our concept.
Their networks are smaller than Star Alliance. But when we became
very successful in the first years, other airlines very quickly
understood that this is the way to go in global air travel. So we
are now competing against two other alliances that are more or less
trying to do the same thing.
Was the idea that miles on any Star Alliance carrier
were applicable across the board an idea you started out
with?
In the very beginning, we had three very simple ideas. One was
to give the customer a global network. Second, let him or her
travel as seamlessly as possible through all the airports in the
world. The third one was, reward the customer’s loyalty across the
whole network, not just on his or her one airline. And to this day,
our customers are telling us that these are exactly the things they
want from Star Alliance.
What’s the idea behind airport “co-locations”? Is it to
put all the member airlines in one area and therefore make it
easier for Star Alliance passengers to switch from one to
another?
That’s exactly the idea. If you know where Star Alliance is, you
know where you can find your own carrier and where you can also
easily connect from one aircraft to another. We can save money by
having certain facilities run side by side. So it’s a win-win
situation, for the customer on one hand and also for the airlines.
We call it the “Move Under One Roof” concept.
How many more co-locations are you
developing?
We already have them at Narita, Nagoya and Bangkok. We’re
opening one at Concourse “J” in Miami soon, and we’ll be looking at
London Heathrow in the next couple of weeks. An ongoing project is
Terminal 1 in Paris, now under construction. It should be ready in
to 2009.
What’s the most unexpected thing that’s happened in your
10 years with Star Alliance?
In the very beginning, I wouldn’t have thought it would have
taken just 10 years to make this an industry-wide, well-accepted
idea. Today, more than two-thirds of all the international
passengers are already flying on one of the three alliances. Most
of the 50 largest airlines in the world are already a part of one
of those alliances. It only took a few years for the concept to
pick up speed, and that was something that not many expected.
