Industry & Business

The Turkish low-cost carrier paid €142.3 million, below the €154 million agreed in December, and now owns all of České aerolinie. Czech authorities required some Prague-Antalya summer slots to be handed to another airline.

They are the only two bidders left in Portugal's privatisation, and the government has two weeks to weigh the financial and strategic terms. Air France-KLM has pledged to keep TAP's brand and make Lisbon its southern European hub.

From two ageing 737s and heavy debt in 1998, the group is on course for about 64 million seats in 2026. OAG says its dollar-cost, weak-currency-revenue squeeze is the core risk.

More than two million commercial flights operated across the EU between June and August, with August up 2.3% year on year. Fuel averaged $3.86 a gallon and IATA expects European airline profits to fall in 2026.

Twenty-three A320-family jets go to a bondholder-controlled entity and four to an FTAI affiliate. The airline stopped flying in May and is liquidating with about 100 staff.

The travel group now expects underlying EBIT of €1.2-1.3 billion for fiscal 2026, below last year's €1.41 billion. Summer bookings in its markets and airline segment are down 5%.

The Latvian flag carrier has filed for Chapter 11 in New York after fuel-cost shocks from the US-Iran conflict and years of aircraft-leasing debt pushed it into a formal restructuring, backed by $405 million in debtor-in-possession financing. Flights, ticket sales and existing bookings continue as normal during the process.

The acquisition brings Polaris Aero's safety-management tools and its database of over 100,000 safety reports and 32 million risk assessments under Veryon, alongside its existing maintenance-tracking data. Polaris will keep running as a separate unit for now, with deeper integration planned later.

OAG's monthly innovation radar highlights three separate rollouts — a multi-agent AI system at Direct Travel, a 700-touchpoint biometric journey at Doha's Hamad International, and an installment-payment plan built into JetBlue's loyalty programme — as examples of systems that remember traveller information instead of re-asking for it. The common thread, OAG argues, is fewer repeated checks and handoffs.

OAG's Ben Maynard points to Expedia, Booking.com and TripAdvisor's shared adoption of Anthropic's Model Context Protocol as evidence that data providers now need to design for AI agents as a customer segment in their own right. He argues most AI travel tools today still just point users elsewhere to actually book.

The trade body now expects a $23 billion industry net profit, down from an earlier $41 billion forecast, after jet fuel prices were projected to jump 70%. Middle Eastern carriers face outright losses from airspace closures even as most other regions stay profitable.