This has been a tough few weeks for the three airline alliances, the quasi-oligopolist consortia that controls perhaps 60 percent of the world's passenger traffic.

Some of the pain points:

• European Union antitrust regulators announced Friday that they were investigating a key part of the SkyTeam Alliance fronted by Delta Air Lines and Air France-KLM. The world's second-largest group of airlines may be forced to divest some takeoff and landing slots, a solution that the EU imposed in 2010 on key members of Oneworld, the third-largest alliance.
• The Star Alliance, which carries almost as many passengers as SkyTeam and Oneworld combined, suffered a blow over the weekend when Spanair, its Catalonia-based component, abruptly stopped flying.
• Oneworld took another hit on Monday when its Hungarian partner, the government-owned flag carrier Malev, admitted that it ran out of cash. Oneworld was rocked late in November when American Airlines, its largest member, flew into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

How much does any of this affect those of us who travel on business? Frankly, not much at all, which says a lot about the alliances themselves.

When originally envisioned about 25 years ago, alliances and codeshares (the practice of putting one airline's two-letter computer code on a flight operated by another carrier) were supposed to make our lives easier. Airline executives floated visions of flights and ground experiences that were seamless from one carrier to another. They promised alliances and codeshares would make life on the road more productive, less stressful, and far less confusing.

But airline alliances (and their legal underpinnings, antitrust immunities that allow supposed competitors to operate as virtual monopolies) have never actually been about the travelers. "Whoever told you alliances were about you was lying," one executive at an international airline told me 15 years ago. "They're about us. They help us cut our cost, restrain capacity, and, I hope, get fares up."

All this said, I have a humble suggestion that might make things a little better for us: a fourth global airline alliance. Not because I believe a new alliance would magically, mystically improve our lot. But simply because I always think more competition is better. If we have gotten out of the business of having individual airlines compete for customers, perhaps we can have more alliances fighting for our business. It would be better than nothing.

Before I make my case, a very brief backgrounder on how we got where we are with just three global behemoths in control of about 1.4 billion travelers a year.

Exactly 20 years ago, British Airways and US Air announced what was then a groundbreaking deal: BA would invest in US Air, and the two would cooperate on flights and align their service. International BA flights would feed flyers to US Air's domestic network and vice versa. The airlines would mesh operations, share airport lounges and frequent-flyer services, and act almost as one combined carrier. Not long after, Northwest Airlines and KLM announced a similar form of cooperation.

Those two deals, and many others, always ended up being eyewash from the passenger's point of view. The airlines took all the benefits—lower operating costs, shared resources, coordinated marketing—and never delivered on their promise of seamless customer service. Even simple things like connecting flights leaving from the same terminals at a common airport were elusive.

Skip forward about a decade and the three existing alliances as we now know them had been created. United Airlines, Air Canada, and Lufthansa formed the backbone of Star. Delta, Air France, and Korean Air were the foundation of SkyTeam. And American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific of Hong Kong, and Qantas of Australia formed the heart of Oneworld. Allied carriers came and went (Aer Lingus was once in Oneworld, but dropped out, and Continental switched from SkyTeam to Star, which led to its eventual merger with United). Some went out of business (Canadian Airlines, a founder of Oneworld, and Varig of Brazil, an early Star Alliance partner). Others merged with each other (Air France and KLM of the Netherlands, British Airways and Iberia of Spain, and Lufthansa of Germany picked off Austrian Airlines and Swiss International).

But as the alliances grew—Star, for example, now has 26 carriers that operate about 21,000 daily flights—they continued to focus more on their needs than ours. They promised plenty, of course, but delivered little. Any frequent flyer can tell you tales of denied entry to shared alliance lounges and dishonored cross-carrier frequent-flyer program perks. And alliance carriers seem to delight in giving you the bureaucratic shuffle when you have to change a multicarrier itinerary or your luggage has gone missing.