ABSTRACT

Although collaboration is often advanced as a new and innovative marketing approach for organizations seeking to achieve competitive advantage, the wider management literature suggests that collaboration has been omnipresent across many industries for many decades. Initial studies by Emery and Trist (1965) set the early foundations for the study of collaboration with contributions from Gray (1985, 1989), Waddock (1989), Terpstra and Simonin (1993), Kanter (1995) and Palmer (1996) further developing the subject throughout the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, Christopher, Payne and Ballantyne (2002: 129) introduced the concept of ‘network competition’ where rewards go to those organizations that are able to best ‘structure, co-ordinate and manage relationships with their partners in a network committed to creating customer and consumer value through collaboration’. This would certainly seem to be the case for international airlines, the case focus of this chapter, although Selin (1993) is one of many who argue that collaboration now represents a strategic necessity in tourism more broadly due to the interdependencies of its predominantly large number of small actors and widespread market fragmentation.