For people in the airlines or travel industry, the term ‘codeshare’
is well understood. For the ones who do not have any knowledge about it, the
term means that one airline will provide the ticketing for the other airline on
certain or all routes which the latter operated. This gives the passengers of
the first airline more destination choices. The airline which provide the
ticketing facility but does not operate one or more legs of the journey is
called the Marketing carrier or partner and the other airline on which the
passenger is actually flown is called the Operating carrier. It is clearly
mention in the airline tickets which airline will be operating the flight. So,
if this is any airline different from the one on which you have booked the
flight, it has to be codeshare arrangement.
Codesharing is a win-win situation for both the airlines and
the passengers. The marketing carrier gains as it is able to provide more
destination choices to the customers. The customer gains because he does not
have to reach out to different airlines to book flights and the work is
accomplished by creating a single itinerary. The operating carrier gains
because it does not have to fly with the empty seats as the customers of
marketing carrier will fill some seats.
American Airlines (AA), one of the biggest carriers of USA,
also has many codeshare partners. These partners are from the oneworld airlines alliance of which AA is also a member. Then there are other airline partners as
well which do not belong to this grouping.
oneworld codeshare partners- British Airways, Cathay
Pacific, Finnair, Iberia, Japan Airlines, LATAM Airlines, Malaysia Airlines, Qantas,
Qatar Airways, Royal Jordanian Airlines, S7 Airlines and SriLankan Airlines.
Other airline partners are- Air Tahiti Nui, Alaska
Airlines/Horizon Air, Cape Air, Etihad Airways, Fiji Airways, Gulf Air,
Hawaiian Airlines, Interjet Jet Airways, Seaborne Airlines and WestJet.
While codesharing facilitates American airlines reservations
for destinations where it does not fly directly, it shall be noted that the
baggage policies of the two carriers might still be different. Similarly, there
could be different policies for ticket cancellation and refunds. Therefore,
passengers are required to first get the right information at the time of airtickets
booking to avoid hassles later on.
