LF Wade International Airport is the place to hang out if you want to find out who’s buying whom in the reinsurance industry, according to XL Group chief executive officer Mike McGavick.

His comments led to the headline “For Front-Row Seat in Deal Action, Try Bermuda’s Airport” in the Wall Street Journal’s MoneyBeat, complete with a picture of an Island beach.

Mr McGavick, whose company has agreed to buy Bermuda-based Catlin in a $4.1 billion deal, expects more mergers to take place in the industry.

“My sense is that we are still at the beginning of the story” of consolidation, he said in an interview with the Journal. With so many insurers basing their operations in Bermuda, “the one thing I can tell you is that the Bermuda airport is a useful place to hang out. Everybody is talking to everybody.”

Mr McGavick added that “the traditional players are going to need to bring more resources to bear in order to defend and grow their positions” and better serve clients who want to deal with reinsurers with global reach.

“To me, it’s going to be more and more common for there to be a mix of traditional reinsurers and non-traditional capital suppliers coming together in different forms,” he said. “I think you’ll see a remarkable set of changes in the industry over the next decade.”

In other deals announced over the past three months, RenaissanceRe Holdings has agreed to acquire Platinum Underwriters Holdings in a $1.9 billion deal expected to close next week, while Axis Capital Holdings and PartnerRe will also join forces in a merger of equals that will create a combined $11 billion company.

The “merger mania”, as it was described by Finance Minister Bob Richards in his Budget statement last week, has come about amid fierce competition in the reinsurance space as a result of an influx of new money into the industry in the form of insurance-linked securities such as catastrophe bonds.

The resulting decline in rates has been exacerbated by below-normal levels of catastrophe claims.