All My Mergers: Spirit Stays Steady with Frontier on Voting Eve
With just one shopping day left until Christmas the vote by Spirit’s shareholders on its potential merger with Frontier, the fee-loving, yellow airplane-flying, kook of an airline reaffirmed its commitment to Frontier on Wednesday.
The commitment from Spirit’s board comes despite Spirit investor TIG Advisors, LLC announcing today it plans to vote against Frontier’s proposal on Thursday. The carrier’s decision to remain loyal to Frontier despite JetBlue repeatedly improving its offer boils down to Spirit believing Frontier’s offer is the one that has a chance of surviving regulatory approval and that contains the synergies necessary to make a tie-up work.
Spirit says despite the increases in its offer, what JetBlue proposes is still well below the $50 or more per share that it believes it will earn from the Frontier deal. And now, we wait.
Pick a Flight, Any Flight: Delta Throws Open its Boarding Doors
Delta Air Lines announced a systemwide travel waiver for the upcoming Fourth of July weekend in which the carrier will basically let anyone holding a ticket to pick a gate at random at their departure airport and board whatever flight pleases them at that moment.
In reality, the carrier is bracing for a challenging operational weekend, and will allow customers to rebook their travel scheduled between July 1 and July 4 with no change fees or fare differences — provided travel is completed by July 8 and retains the same origin and destination. The preemptive strike from Delta is designed to hope some passengers rebook their travel away from the peak days of this upcoming weekend to allow it to build some slack into its operation before trouble begins. Good luck.
Delta is expecting to carry more travelers this weekend than any weekend since the pandemic. It currently hopes to get some of those people to wherever the hell it is they’re going, but it can’t say when that will be, and asks that you are patient while it figures out why you ended up on one coast and your bags on another.
Star Alliance Ready to Ride the Rails
Star Alliance is adding Deutsche Bahn as its first intermodal member, a fancy way of saying the alliance is adding trains to the club that’s been exclusive to airplanes since the alliance’s founding two decades ago.
The two are hosting a press conference to announce the partnership on July 4 — America, baby! — to reveal the details. What we know at this point is that the trains will not fly at any point during the length of DB’s membership in the alliance, and the rail line promises to weaken its on-time and operational performance to better match its alliance partners.
- Aeromexico shareholders support the carrier’s exit from the Mexican stock exchange.
- Air Tahiti Nui flights are now bookable with Alaska miles.
- ANA plans to use Air Japan to compete with other long-haul LCCs.
- British Airways is consolidating its operation at its London/Heathrow base in Terminal 5 for the time being due to a shortage of staff and flights that people are looking forward to.
- Cargojet acquired it first B777-300ER for cargo conversion.
- Silk Way West ordered two A350Fs.
- SWISS will cut about 2% of its summer schedule in a cold, calculating, and efficient manner.
My cousin finally gave up smoking cold turkey.
He’s doing better now but he still coughs up feathers from time to time.