These are the two deepest partnerships in the game. A joint venture pools money with one partner on a specific market; an alliance is a multi-carrier club whose founding charter decides how it behaves.
Joint ventures#
A joint venture pools passenger revenue, and only revenue, between two airlines on traffic flying between two groups of countries you define (for example, "North America" on one side and "Western Europe" on the other). It is metal-neutral: whoever flies the passengers, the pool decides who keeps the money.
- Every flight either partner operates between the two country groups pays its passenger revenue into a shared pool.
- At each financial close, the pool is re-divided by capacity share (the proportion of seat-kilometres each partner flew in the venture's scope), and a settlement transfer moves the difference between you. You'll see it on your ledger; see Ledger & income statement.
- There is no negotiated split percentage: fly more capacity, keep more of the pool. Costs and cargo are never pooled.
Setup is a simple propose-and-accept on the Partners → Codeshares page (the Joint Ventures panel): pick a partner and two non-overlapping country groups. One venture per pair of airlines. Either side can terminate at any time; the running period settles immediately with the same capacity-share math, so quitting mid-period can't be gamed.
Alliances#
An alliance is founded with a charter, a short constitution fixed at creation:
| Charter choice | Options |
|---|---|
| Alliance code | A 2–3 character brand code shown in the Directory |
| Member interlining | Manual, opt-in (joining proposes agreements), or required (joining activates them) |
| Admission | Founder approves, or majority vote of the members |
| Exclusivity | Open, or no interlining outside the alliance |
| Member cap | Unlimited, or a fixed maximum |
With required interlining, joining instantly creates active interline agreements with every member, and leaving or being expelled terminates them. These show on the Interlining page tagged with the alliance; see Interlining.
Admission by vote: in majority-vote alliances, outsiders apply and each member casts a single, unchangeable yes or no. A strict majority of current members admits; the Alliance page shows the live tally. Voting exists only for admissions; charters themselves can't be amended by vote.
Founder powers: invite (where the charter allows), expel, suspend and reinstate members, hand the founder seat to someone else, or disband. A suspended member stays on the roster but loses its alliance interlines and all benefits until reinstated. Leaving is always your right; if the last member leaves, the alliance dissolves.
Benefits: beyond automatic interlining and shared branding, worlds can grant chartered alliances booking advantages: passengers mildly preferring all-alliance connections, an awareness lift where members operate side by side, and a small revenue sweetener on feed traffic. All of these are off by default, so check whether your world enables them. The Alliance page also shows how many passengers you fed to and received from partners in the current booking window.
Older worlds may contain pre-charter alliances that simply interline all members implicitly; their founder can adopt a charter to upgrade them. AI carriers found, join, and vote in alliances too; see AI carriers.