I couldn’t let this year finish up without squeezing in one more post on Alitalia. It’s just too much fun. The airline has finished up the year just as it started, by being completely and totally awful in every way.
The sale of the airline is now completed and CAI will be relaunching the carrier in 
the next few weeks. We still have no idea which partner airline CAI will choose for Alitalia. I’m not sure what the holdup has been this time, but I’m not really going to bother trying to figure it out. They say it’ll be a “few weeks” but at the same time they say they’re close. Right.
But more importantly, the employees are unhappy (surprise, surprise) and they decided to take action at the worst possible time. You always have sympathy when people are at risk of losing their jobs, but I lose all sympathy completely when they decide to throw a wildcat strike only a couple days before Christmas, stranding travelers who just want to be with their families.
Apparently about 100 flights were scrapped on December 22 and another 40 or so on December 23 as the extremely selfish employees decided to walk off the job and take out their frustrations on innocent passengers. Shame on you all.
On the management side, Alitalia continues to try to shrink. The airline strangely decided to take ads out in a bunch of papers including the Financial Times saying that it was soliciting bids for 46 aircraft. That hardly sounds like the right way to handle this. Heck, it doesn’t sound effective at all.
But if you’re interested, they’re trying to pawn off a couple 767s, 22 MD-80s (I hear Allegiant knocking), 14 Embraer regional jets, and 8 ATR 72 turboprops. You could probably talk them into parting with one of those ERJs for a couple sheep and a bottle of wine.
Let’s raise our glasses on New Year’s Eve with the hope that Alitalia will continue to provide me with excellent blog fodder for years to come. Somehow I have no doubts.
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Alitalia Ends the Year By Sucking as Usual
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