Coopetition strategy in the airline sector: A research on traditional airline companies

Coopetition strategy is a business strategy that competition and cooperation is carried out at the same time, is used especially in intense-competition sectors by two or more businesses. On the one hand, competitors cooperate to produce a new product or service in accordance with mutual interests, on the other hand, they keep on competition on other areas. In coopetition, businesses brought together their core competences and resources, have shared costs and risks in production of a new product or service. Thus, businesses shared costs and risks, have gained capability to see their future clearly and take long-term decisions comfortably. Airline sector has a structure that operations are realized with high costs and is affected uncertainty, risk and crisis environments immediately due to its characteristics. Airline companies have applied coopetition strategy to get over these problems and gain sustainable competition advantage. They have carried out these applications with agreements they have made with rival airline companies within strategic airline alliances or except for strategic airline alliances. The aim of this study is to reveal experiences of airline companies applied coopetition strategy. It was made semi-structured interviews with senior executives of five traditional airline companies with this aim. The most important result in this study is necessity of coopetition strategy for sustainability of airline industry. One of the highlights of the results in this study, is that strategic airline alliance members began questioning the airline alliances and alliances in order to continue their existence should have a more flexible structure in order to keep going their existence.