Is a merger the best solution?

This week the British Airways press team sent a news release to the different media to announce the benefits of its merger with Iberia. But this deal has produced a lot of critiques, not only in UK, in Spain too.

In this moment, when a lot of companies are suffering the problems of the crisis, most of them look for a merger to survive, but is it the best solution?

If we think about economic benefits, maybe yes, because Iberia is living a difficult situation, since it lost 182 millions of Euros in the last three months and the number of passenger decreased too. However, if we think about internal effects in both companies, media or competence, maybe the effects are different.

PRWeek published the news of the deal on Friday, but I think that the main idea, it is not in the news, otherwise in the comment that is in the bottom of the page. I think that the sentence "good news for shareholders, neutral for passengers and a challenging period for the staff of both carriers", summarize very well the future consequences of this deal. Moreover, in this feature we can see like the media have not written about the benefits of the deal, otherwise the bad effect in the workers.

The Spanish media only published the critiques of Michael O’Leary, "The merger between BA and Iberia is like two drunks who try to stand up one with the help of the another", and Richard Branson, owner of Virgin Atlantics, spoke about the consequences for the competence, "this deal could limit the competence, for example, both companies could manage the 45% of the traffic in the airport of Heathrow in London".

In conclusion, maybe in economic terms this deal is appropriated for the companies, but what about their image?