SkyTeam: The Alliance Built on Two Holding Companies

SkyTeam launched on 22 June 2000, the youngest of the three global alliances. Its founders were Air France, Delta Air Lines, Aeromexico and Korean Air. Twenty-five years on, it has 18 member airlines serving more than 945 destinations in 145 countries. Unusually among the three, much of that growth didn’t come from airlines choosing to join. It came from SkyTeam’s own founders buying into other airlines and bringing them along.

Grown by acquisition, not just recruitment

Air France and Delta each sit at the centre of a bigger structure: Air France-KLM Group, and a wider Delta-led transatlantic partnership built on Delta’s stakes in other airlines. When those groups take over an airline, SkyTeam membership has tended to follow. The clearest recent case is Scandinavian Airlines (SAS). In 2024, as SAS came out of bankruptcy protection, Air France-KLM Group took a 19.9% stake in it. On 1 September 2024 SAS left Star Alliance, where it had been a member for decades, and joined SkyTeam, simply because its new shareholder anchored SkyTeam. Air France-KLM has since agreed to take majority control, with the deal expected to complete in the second half of 2026.

The Delta-Virgin Atlantic-Air France-KLM triangle

Virgin Atlantic officially joined SkyTeam on 2 March 2023, becoming its only UK member. The membership sits on top of an already close relationship. Delta owns 49% of Virgin Atlantic (bought from Singapore Airlines in 2013), Air France-KLM Group owns 31% (bought from Virgin Group in 2022), and the three airlines run a transatlantic joint venture that shares revenue on joint routes. Joining SkyTeam made formal, at alliance level, a relationship that already existed through ownership.

Does SkyTeam membership still matter to Delta?

Here’s the awkward question: does broad alliance membership still drive Delta’s strategy, or has something else quietly taken over? Over the past decade the industry has moved from simple codeshares, where one airline sells seats on a partner’s flight, to “metal-neutral” joint ventures. In those, two airlines share all the revenue on a route, whichever one operates the flight. That ties them together far more deeply than an alliance does. Delta shows the pattern. It owns stakes in Air France-KLM, Virgin Atlantic, Aeromexico and Korean Air. All four happen to be SkyTeam members, but it’s the stakes and the revenue-sharing joint ventures doing the real commercial work, not the alliance badge. A SkyTeam member that Delta has no stake in or joint venture with gets noticeably less of its attention. Alliance membership is becoming the base layer beneath a small set of much tighter two-airline partnerships, not the main strategy itself.

When one of your own founders walks out — China Southern, 2019

SkyTeam’s growth hasn’t gone in one direction only, and the clearest exception is one of its biggest members. China Southern Airlines, not a founder but a member from the alliance’s early growth years and one of the world’s largest airlines by fleet size, announced in November 2018 that it would leave SkyTeam. It left formally on 31 December 2019. The reasons trace back to ownership, a theme that runs through this site. Delta had taken a stake in fellow SkyTeam member China Eastern in 2015, and China Eastern then deepened its partnership with Air France-KLM, leaving China Southern feeling sidelined in an alliance it had helped grow. In 2017, American Airlines had completed a $200 million investment in China Southern, giving it a real partner outside SkyTeam. China Southern also decided that membership cost a lot for what it got back. Its goal of becoming the world’s largest airline by fleet size, it judged, would be better served by its own partnerships than by cooperating with rivals it was also competing against for Chinese domestic and international passengers. It has stayed outside all three global alliances ever since, running its own web of two-airline deals, including with American Airlines.

Market position

SkyTeam holds about 13.7% of the global airline market, behind Star Alliance’s 17.4% but ahead of Oneworld’s 11.9%. Virgin Atlantic joined in 2023 and SAS in 2024. That growth came largely from alliance membership following ownership, rather than from independent airlines choosing to join, and it has held up even after losing a member as big as China Southern.

Sources & Further Reading

• SkyTeam turns 25 — Official SkyTeam release ↗
• Virgin Atlantic — SkyTeam ↗
• SkyTeam — Wikipedia ↗
• Airline Alliances Vs Joint Ventures: What's The Difference? — Simple Flying ↗
• China Southern To Leave The SkyTeam Alliance — The Points Guy ↗
• Why Did China Southern Quit SkyTeam? — Simple Flying ↗