Star Alliance is maintaining a wait and see approach in efforts to add an airline partner in Russia, the last of its previously announced “white spots” where it was seeking to improve its coverage.

Brazilian carrier TAM is set to become the alliance’s 24th member after accepting an invitation to join the alliance. Star currently has 21 members, while Air India and Continental Airlines - like TAM - are Star bound.

Speaking at an event to mark TAM’s decision to join Star Alliance, the latter’s CEO Jaan Albrecht said: “We have said we had white sports in Brazil, India, China and Russia and we have covered three of these.

“With Russia we have a wait and see approach. They have gone from having one airline to 300, and some consolidation is taking place. We are seeing quite dramatic consolidation.”

Russian flag carrier Aeroflot is already a member of SkyTeam and one of the options Star had been looking at was airline grouping AirUnion. The latter though ha

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 9:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.