Which Are Europe’s Remaining Independent Airlines? – The Last of The Mohicans

The landscape of European aviation has changed, and is still changing, massively since the early 2000s. Consolidation has been the keyword of the last quarter of a century. That, while involving many carriers in the continent, has oddly left out a small number of airlines that, to this day, remain the outlier independent carriers.

Consolidation The Path To Remain Competitive on The Global Stage

European carriers came to realize that small national carriers can’t compete effectively on the global stage against aviation powerhouses such as Emirates, Qatar Airways or Singapore Airlines just to name a few.

Therefore, airlines have progressively teamed up resorting to M&As to form large conglomerates that are much more relevant and influential globally than single national carriers. The event that exposed exactly how frail European national carriers were and are on their own, was no doubt 9/11.

If you had to pinpoint one event that started the domino effect that still is ongoing today, that would be the one. Exactly as US carriers consolidated in the wake of the tragic events, so did European ones. If anything European airlines were in an even more complex situation.

Prior to 2001, the European aviation industry was made up of many smaller sized national airlines that competed with each other for passengers. State subsidies were still a thing and in many cases they kept the airlines afloat despite some of them never turning a profit for almost their entire existence. When 2001’s events sent shockwaves through the industry, many of these airlines just couldn’t stay afloat or had to massively downsize, while others resorted to mergers to reduce costs and increase competitiveness.

Among those that didn’t make it you can’t not mention carriers such as: Swissair or Sabena (Belgium) or Olympic Airways (Greece). To mention one prime example of airline that continued to operate but never recovered, Alitalia which eventually became ITA Airways. Finally to list a few groups that came into existence via M&As:

• Lufthansa Group
• IAG
• Air France-KLM

Despite the numerous acquisitions and mergers that have taken place, a group of few airlines to this day remains still independent and unaffiliated with any of these groups. Let’s dive deeper into which they are and what their possible future.

The Few Remaining Independent European Airlines – Why and What Will They Do?

Now that we’ve covered how we’ve gotten to the current state of affairs, let’s talk about these European aviation industry outliers.

Now, I will only be referring to full service airlines, what many might also refer to as legacy airlines. Why? Well, generally low-cost carriers don’t group up or consolidate. They tend to be their own standalone entity that tries to expand its footprint as much as possible on its own.

Without further ado, there are in my opinion 2, or even 4 depending on the point of view (I’ll explain later why), independent airlines up for grabs on the market, with them being:

• Air Europa
• TAP Air Portugal
• Finnair
• LOT Polish Airlines

Now the two that are totally unaffiliated with any major group are Air Europa and TAP. Finnair, on the other hand while independently owned has some sort of affiliation with a major airline group.

Air Europa has been very close to a IAG takeover in the past year or so. The British Airways and Iberia lead airline group was looking to make its position all the more dominant in the Iberian peninsula by taking over the other major player in Spain to South America flights. However, the deal didn’t have a successful outcome due to IAG not accepting concessions requested by the European Commission antitrust authorities.

TAP Air Portugal has instead been linked time and time again to Air France-KLM and Lufthansa. Despite that Portuguese airline still remains totally independent from any of Europe’s major groups. Lufthansa acquired ITA Airways and Air France-KLM invested in SAS, meaning that those two options, at lease in the short term, are off the table. The remaining option IAG is far from ideal for a flag carrier such as TAP for one simple reason: IAG already controls a much larger Iberian airline: Iberia

Therefore, if IAG were to takeover TAP Air Portugal could become a second fiddle to the much larger and influential airline in the peninsula. That’s why out of the 3 carriers I mentioned TAP is the most likely to remain independent for the longest time.

Finally let’s wrap things up covering Finnair and LOT. The Finnish national carrier remains an independent airline. However, it is, as mentioned above, affiliated in some ways to the IAG group. The airline shares frequent flyer currency with Iberia, British Airways, and Qatar Airways (Avios) and has close partnerships with them. Therefore, it is difficult to classify Finnair as a totally independent airline. Same goes for LOT. The Polish carrier similarly to Finnair has very strong ties to the Lufthansa family of airlines. It goes as far as sharing the same frequent flyer program Miles&More.

What will be of these airlines? Well, for the time being I don’t see them really ending up in any of the major airline groups. However, things mights change by quite a margin in the medium to long term.