7 ms·

Italy reveals its new national airline

53 points by simonebrunozzi 5y ago

pnunesc 5y ago
Portugal national airliner TAP, that is also a black hole of tax payers money, should have the same faith as Alitalia.
supermatt 5y ago
> everything will be centopercento italiano. Except the aircraft...
sharmin123 5y ago
Are There Top Signs of a Cheating Lover? What To do Then?: https://www.hackerslist.co/are-there-top-signs-of-a-cheating-lover-what-to-do-then/ https://www.hackerslist.co/are-there-top-signs-of-a-cheating...
flybrand 5y ago
> Alitalia was drowning in debt for years before the pandemic, but Francavilla said that the future is bright for ITA, calling the airline "right-sized" both in terms of fleet, staffing and routing. It’s a mature industry undergoing massive change - isn’t this just a rebranding of a restructuring?
- Animats 5y ago
  > Isn’t this just a rebranding of a restructuring? Yes. IAC Aircraft Painting has done one aircraft paint job for ITA, but most of the fleet will bear the old Alitalia logo for a while.[1] Big layoffs. Alitalia had around 10,000 employees; ITA will start with about 2,800. [1] https://www.italy24news.com/business/219410.html https://www.italy24news.com/business/219410.html
- bjohnson225 5y ago
  Alitalia went bankrupt so this is technically a new company that has purchased some Alitalia assets. The staff they hired were not all from Alitalia. I hope it’s a success and they’re able to grow because right now many Italy to Europe routes are served only by Ryanair (sure, they’re often cheap, but you get what you pay for).
  - mmarq 5y ago
    Alitalia used to be very expensive and much worse than Ryanair. Personnel was extremely rude and unprofessional, they were striking more often than not, they were as unreliable as EasyJet if not worse. I stopped using them when they destroyed my bag, I called the callcenter to get a refund and the operator told me, with a very thick regional accent, that they weren’t going to reimburse me and that if I weren’t happy about it I had to sue them.
squarefoot 5y ago
All fine. Too bad in the process over 7000 people lost their jobs.
- themihai 5y ago
  I wonder how many of the 7K people were just moving papers around...
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    Surely not all of them, since the Alitalia fleet size just a couple years ago was over twice the size of the current ITA one. And by the way, if someone is paid to move papers around, the fault should be on whoever hired him/her.
    - hhhh7776 5y ago
      Sometimes. Sometimes it a bigger problem, and goes all the way to top and beyond to country's traditions and problems (nepotism and corruption, buy a job style). Thai airways had a lot of people moving paper for example, you purchased your job there.
      - squarefoot 5y ago
        Yes, also there are old tricks to downsize a company in creative ways, such as 1:create a new one, 2:bankrupt the old one, 3:buying back the old brand and 4:rename the new one as the old one, only without hiring back the old workforce. ITA just bought the Alitalia brand, so we are at 3; I don't think they would keep the historical brand unused or relegate it to trivial side projects.
    - jokethrowaway 5y ago
      Absolutely. The problems start when someone is being paid with money sourced from everyone's salaries (aka taxes), some idiot middle manager (likely friend of someone) is the one deciding where to put the money and a company can't fail until decades later when the government stop bailing them out.
powera 5y ago
This seems like it's just a re-branding and downsizing exercise. Which isn't a bad idea. An old joke is that Alitalia = "Always Late In Takeoff, Always Late In Arrival".
- Bilal_io 5y ago
  So they rebranded to "Always Takeoff Arrival".
- giorgioz 5y ago
  Italian Software Engineer here. Yes it seems it's a rebranding and downsizing operation. The articles have very strong nationalist and arrogant tones masked as pride. Please remember that is the product of some marketing guy trying to attract your attention. It saddens me to discover that acronym for Alitalia. I was aware of the FIAT one. It shows the stereotypes of Italian being good only at good and clothes. Italy is a country of 60 millions people. There are a LOT of people good and bad at many things. As an Italian Software Engineer I personally struggle through life because of this. It's a constant battle to fight stereotypes imposed on me by both foreigners and other italians that just think "fuck it, if they think we are only good at that then we'll dress up and give them a show".
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    As a fellow Italian software engineer living abroad, this is completely uncalled for. I'm the first to joke about Alitalia and the extraordinarily inefficiency of most Italian government owned institutions. It's not even a stereotype, the Italian government really is terrible at managing anything. There's plenty of data on that. Every country has stereotypes and Italian ones are not even too bad. Well dressed, cooking well, good with girls, terrible bureaucracy. I don't feel one bit Italian for various reasons, but I'm more than happy to wear a stereotype when it's convenient and ignore it when it's not. Despite what you may have learned from 2021 politics, playing the victim card won't get you far or get you any sympathy from people with a brain.
    - giorgioz 5y ago
Gatsky 5y ago
> They've long dominated the food and fashion worlds, this year they've dominated sports, and now they're aiming for the skies. This is a joke perhaps?
- mongol 5y ago
  At least they won the Euro 2020 this summer, but were they successful in the Olympics too?
  - avereveard 5y ago
    Not in terms of medals but the 100m sprint is a significant achievement.
- kajbdiuah2u 5y ago
  I hear they had a decent empire going at some point also. Somebody should let this journalist know.
jasonjei 5y ago
Is it bad that when I hear ITA, I think of the airline pricing optimization software system that Google bought?
- hhhh7776 5y ago
  Same here.
sandworm101 5y ago
>> They've long dominated the food and fashion worlds, this year they've dominated sports, and now they're aiming for the skies. Being the best at something wins you a prize. It rarely ever means market share. Italy has a great football team, but what percentage of world football is played there? They certainly have all the best fashion, but what percentage of the world's clothing is manufactured in Italy? This philosophy will not translate well to air travel. Having the best planes and the best staff in the world means little compared to having the lowest price and best on-time performance.
- giorgioz 5y ago
  Italian software engineer here. Just ignore the douchebags that came up with that rebranding strategy and the journalists that indulge them. It's all a massive show put on to get the investors money. It's wrong to reduce a country of 60 millions people to be "good chef and good designers". Don't lean into stereotypes of other countries and don't listen to people that try to use stereotypes to market you products from that country. Especially when the whole thing is wrapped with strong nationalism masked as pride.
  - tatoalo 5y ago
    Completely agree with you, this journalist’s bs is not really helping anyone to be thoroughly informed about the situation.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    A chicken and egg situation. Tourism campaigns, of which the branding of national airlines is a cornerstone, is where we get stereotypes. British airways promotes itself as the stable luxury carrier. Ryanair promotes the "frugal Irishman" image. The asian airlines usually promote their cabin crew's attention to customer service. Even Westjet promotes the "friendly Canadian" stereotype through their various christmas stunts.
    - Graffur 5y ago
      What's a "frugal Irishman" image? Ever heard of the Celtic tiger? Irish people are not frugal as a trait.. to their own demise.
kajbdiuah2u 5y ago
"The planes will resemble what you’d expect a pasta-flavored energy drink to look like. And to show you that this will be a real business, we paid all $2 of our marketing budget for this Photoshop file."
robbiet480 5y ago
> "We have been born as a new Italian brand, and we have chosen to work only with Italian companies," said Alfredo Altavilla, president of ITA Airways. Only Italian companies except for a little one called checks notes Airbus
- liamkinne 5y ago
  Airbus use a number of Italian suppliers [1]. Not 100% Italian made, but probably supporting more Italian jobs than buying Boeing. [1] https://www.google.com/search?channel=trow5&client=firefox-b-d&q=airbus+approved+suppliers https://www.google.com/search?channel=trow5&client=firefox-b...
- sandworm101 5y ago
  That might make it difficult to obtain fuel at airports outside of Italy. Even if he was only referring to their operations within Italy, good luck doing anything in Europe without dealing with cross-border entities.
blue1 5y ago
Alitalia was a monstrous money-destroying machine and a famously poor airline, kept alive for political reasons only, sold in patriotic wrapping. As an Italian I don’t expect this reincarnation to be anything different.
- waltherg 5y ago
  Come on mate what's with the pessimism. When did the rich upper class of Italy fail to deliver for the remaining 99% of Italy? Oh wait ...
PaywallBuster 5y ago
looks like a bankruptcy reorganization (similar to Chapter 11) Free hand to layoff staff and let go of debts so they can have a "new start"
Tade0 5y ago
"We are running different businesses. I fly people and they fly battery chicken farms," It's refreshing to hear someone say that. Cheap airlines have been competing in a race to the bottom for a while now, and the result is pretty horrible. As for Alitalia - I've flown them once and it was the only time I've seen alcoholic drinks being distributed after a series of turbulences. Unorthodox, but can't say it didn't help. Ryanair would probably try to sell me the same thing for €4.
swiftcoder 5y ago
> ITA has found a novel way to invigorate workers: every single employee will have a part of their salary linked not only to the company profits, but also to customer satisfaction. Clearly this man has never flown United...
- ysangkok 5y ago
  What are you hinting at? Does excessive linking of satisfaction with compensation result in unethical prostitution?
  - swiftcoder 5y ago
    Excessive investment of one's pension fund in the airline itself makes for some very disgruntled employees working well past the average age of retirement. United managed to shift a lot of it's post 9/11 losses onto the employee pension fund as a result of the union buy-in to company ownership.
  - nradov 5y ago
    United Airlines employees bought the majority of the company in 1994. It was literally an employee owned airline so they had every incentive to keep customers happy and find ways to boost shareholder returns. But the unions managed to wreck the company (again) and never delivered any better service to customers. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-07-13-mn-15156-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-07-13-mn-15156-...
denysvitali 5y ago
In perfect italian development style, their website https://www.itaspa.com/ https://www.itaspa.com/ redirects to a page depending on your IETF Language Code (e.g: en-US becomes en_us, https://www.itaspa.com/en_us https://www.itaspa.com/en_us) and the resulting page is a 500 (only 3 lines of the header are sent). The italian version (it_it) works fine tough. Edit: oh wow, apparently it's not an IETF Language code: https://www.itaspa.com/en_en https://www.itaspa.com/en_en works, but the browser is redirected using another language code. Edit2: They also have en_it lol
- foepys 5y ago
  > Edit2: They also have en_it lol I loved my old Android smartphone that had knew a en_DE locale. The English language with German date and number formatting was nice. It's a bit strange that those custom localization settings that have existed on Windows since at least XP are not available on some modern OSs/UIs.
felixfbecker 5y ago
Will be interesting which alliance they join. If they join Star Alliance and they truly will deliver on being a more premium airline I might try them out for a flight to Italy!
saargrin 5y ago
in this day and age,who cares if the service team on the aircraft are dressed in uniforms by famous designers?

pnunesc 5y ago

Portugal national airliner TAP, that is also a black hole of tax payers money, should have the same faith as Alitalia.

supermatt 5y ago

> everything will be centopercento italiano. Except the aircraft...

sharmin123 5y ago

Are There Top Signs of a Cheating Lover? What To do Then?: https://www.hackerslist.co/are-there-top-signs-of-a-cheating-lover-what-to-do-then/ https://www.hackerslist.co/are-there-top-signs-of-a-cheating...

flybrand 5y ago

> Alitalia was drowning in debt for years before the pandemic, but Francavilla said that the future is bright for ITA, calling the airline "right-sized" both in terms of fleet, staffing and routing. It’s a mature industry undergoing massive change - isn’t this just a rebranding of a restructuring?

Animats 5y ago
> Isn’t this just a rebranding of a restructuring? Yes. IAC Aircraft Painting has done one aircraft paint job for ITA, but most of the fleet will bear the old Alitalia logo for a while.[1] Big layoffs. Alitalia had around 10,000 employees; ITA will start with about 2,800. [1] https://www.italy24news.com/business/219410.html https://www.italy24news.com/business/219410.html
bjohnson225 5y ago
Alitalia went bankrupt so this is technically a new company that has purchased some Alitalia assets. The staff they hired were not all from Alitalia. I hope it’s a success and they’re able to grow because right now many Italy to Europe routes are served only by Ryanair (sure, they’re often cheap, but you get what you pay for).
- mmarq 5y ago
  Alitalia used to be very expensive and much worse than Ryanair. Personnel was extremely rude and unprofessional, they were striking more often than not, they were as unreliable as EasyJet if not worse. I stopped using them when they destroyed my bag, I called the callcenter to get a refund and the operator told me, with a very thick regional accent, that they weren’t going to reimburse me and that if I weren’t happy about it I had to sue them.

squarefoot 5y ago

All fine. Too bad in the process over 7000 people lost their jobs.

themihai 5y ago
I wonder how many of the 7K people were just moving papers around...
- squarefoot 5y ago
  Surely not all of them, since the Alitalia fleet size just a couple years ago was over twice the size of the current ITA one. And by the way, if someone is paid to move papers around, the fault should be on whoever hired him/her.
  - hhhh7776 5y ago
    Sometimes. Sometimes it a bigger problem, and goes all the way to top and beyond to country's traditions and problems (nepotism and corruption, buy a job style). Thai airways had a lot of people moving paper for example, you purchased your job there.
    - squarefoot 5y ago
      Yes, also there are old tricks to downsize a company in creative ways, such as 1:create a new one, 2:bankrupt the old one, 3:buying back the old brand and 4:rename the new one as the old one, only without hiring back the old workforce. ITA just bought the Alitalia brand, so we are at 3; I don't think they would keep the historical brand unused or relegate it to trivial side projects.
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    Absolutely. The problems start when someone is being paid with money sourced from everyone's salaries (aka taxes), some idiot middle manager (likely friend of someone) is the one deciding where to put the money and a company can't fail until decades later when the government stop bailing them out.

powera 5y ago

This seems like it's just a re-branding and downsizing exercise. Which isn't a bad idea. An old joke is that Alitalia = "Always Late In Takeoff, Always Late In Arrival".

Bilal_io 5y ago
So they rebranded to "Always Takeoff Arrival".
giorgioz 5y ago
Italian Software Engineer here. Yes it seems it's a rebranding and downsizing operation. The articles have very strong nationalist and arrogant tones masked as pride. Please remember that is the product of some marketing guy trying to attract your attention. It saddens me to discover that acronym for Alitalia. I was aware of the FIAT one. It shows the stereotypes of Italian being good only at good and clothes. Italy is a country of 60 millions people. There are a LOT of people good and bad at many things. As an Italian Software Engineer I personally struggle through life because of this. It's a constant battle to fight stereotypes imposed on me by both foreigners and other italians that just think "fuck it, if they think we are only good at that then we'll dress up and give them a show".
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  As a fellow Italian software engineer living abroad, this is completely uncalled for. I'm the first to joke about Alitalia and the extraordinarily inefficiency of most Italian government owned institutions. It's not even a stereotype, the Italian government really is terrible at managing anything. There's plenty of data on that. Every country has stereotypes and Italian ones are not even too bad. Well dressed, cooking well, good with girls, terrible bureaucracy. I don't feel one bit Italian for various reasons, but I'm more than happy to wear a stereotype when it's convenient and ignore it when it's not. Despite what you may have learned from 2021 politics, playing the victim card won't get you far or get you any sympathy from people with a brain.
  - giorgioz 5y ago

Gatsky 5y ago

> They've long dominated the food and fashion worlds, this year they've dominated sports, and now they're aiming for the skies. This is a joke perhaps?

mongol 5y ago
At least they won the Euro 2020 this summer, but were they successful in the Olympics too?
- avereveard 5y ago
  Not in terms of medals but the 100m sprint is a significant achievement.
kajbdiuah2u 5y ago
I hear they had a decent empire going at some point also. Somebody should let this journalist know.

jasonjei 5y ago

Is it bad that when I hear ITA, I think of the airline pricing optimization software system that Google bought?

hhhh7776 5y ago
Same here.

sandworm101 5y ago

>> They've long dominated the food and fashion worlds, this year they've dominated sports, and now they're aiming for the skies. Being the best at something wins you a prize. It rarely ever means market share. Italy has a great football team, but what percentage of world football is played there? They certainly have all the best fashion, but what percentage of the world's clothing is manufactured in Italy? This philosophy will not translate well to air travel. Having the best planes and the best staff in the world means little compared to having the lowest price and best on-time performance.

giorgioz 5y ago
Italian software engineer here. Just ignore the douchebags that came up with that rebranding strategy and the journalists that indulge them. It's all a massive show put on to get the investors money. It's wrong to reduce a country of 60 millions people to be "good chef and good designers". Don't lean into stereotypes of other countries and don't listen to people that try to use stereotypes to market you products from that country. Especially when the whole thing is wrapped with strong nationalism masked as pride.
- tatoalo 5y ago
  Completely agree with you, this journalist’s bs is not really helping anyone to be thoroughly informed about the situation.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  A chicken and egg situation. Tourism campaigns, of which the branding of national airlines is a cornerstone, is where we get stereotypes. British airways promotes itself as the stable luxury carrier. Ryanair promotes the "frugal Irishman" image. The asian airlines usually promote their cabin crew's attention to customer service. Even Westjet promotes the "friendly Canadian" stereotype through their various christmas stunts.
  - Graffur 5y ago
    What's a "frugal Irishman" image? Ever heard of the Celtic tiger? Irish people are not frugal as a trait.. to their own demise.

kajbdiuah2u 5y ago

"The planes will resemble what you’d expect a pasta-flavored energy drink to look like. And to show you that this will be a real business, we paid all $2 of our marketing budget for this Photoshop file."

robbiet480 5y ago

> "We have been born as a new Italian brand, and we have chosen to work only with Italian companies," said Alfredo Altavilla, president of ITA Airways. Only Italian companies except for a little one called checks notes Airbus

liamkinne 5y ago
Airbus use a number of Italian suppliers [1]. Not 100% Italian made, but probably supporting more Italian jobs than buying Boeing. [1] https://www.google.com/search?channel=trow5&client=firefox-b-d&q=airbus+approved+suppliers https://www.google.com/search?channel=trow5&client=firefox-b...
sandworm101 5y ago
That might make it difficult to obtain fuel at airports outside of Italy. Even if he was only referring to their operations within Italy, good luck doing anything in Europe without dealing with cross-border entities.

blue1 5y ago

Alitalia was a monstrous money-destroying machine and a famously poor airline, kept alive for political reasons only, sold in patriotic wrapping. As an Italian I don’t expect this reincarnation to be anything different.

waltherg 5y ago
Come on mate what's with the pessimism. When did the rich upper class of Italy fail to deliver for the remaining 99% of Italy? Oh wait ...

PaywallBuster 5y ago

looks like a bankruptcy reorganization (similar to Chapter 11) Free hand to layoff staff and let go of debts so they can have a "new start"

Tade0 5y ago

"We are running different businesses. I fly people and they fly battery chicken farms," It's refreshing to hear someone say that. Cheap airlines have been competing in a race to the bottom for a while now, and the result is pretty horrible. As for Alitalia - I've flown them once and it was the only time I've seen alcoholic drinks being distributed after a series of turbulences. Unorthodox, but can't say it didn't help. Ryanair would probably try to sell me the same thing for €4.

swiftcoder 5y ago

> ITA has found a novel way to invigorate workers: every single employee will have a part of their salary linked not only to the company profits, but also to customer satisfaction. Clearly this man has never flown United...

ysangkok 5y ago
What are you hinting at? Does excessive linking of satisfaction with compensation result in unethical prostitution?
- swiftcoder 5y ago
  Excessive investment of one's pension fund in the airline itself makes for some very disgruntled employees working well past the average age of retirement. United managed to shift a lot of it's post 9/11 losses onto the employee pension fund as a result of the union buy-in to company ownership.
- nradov 5y ago
  United Airlines employees bought the majority of the company in 1994. It was literally an employee owned airline so they had every incentive to keep customers happy and find ways to boost shareholder returns. But the unions managed to wreck the company (again) and never delivered any better service to customers. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-07-13-mn-15156-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-07-13-mn-15156-...

denysvitali 5y ago

In perfect italian development style, their website https://www.itaspa.com/ https://www.itaspa.com/ redirects to a page depending on your IETF Language Code (e.g: en-US becomes en_us, https://www.itaspa.com/en_us https://www.itaspa.com/en_us) and the resulting page is a 500 (only 3 lines of the header are sent). The italian version (it_it) works fine tough. Edit: oh wow, apparently it's not an IETF Language code: https://www.itaspa.com/en_en https://www.itaspa.com/en_en works, but the browser is redirected using another language code. Edit2: They also have en_it lol

foepys 5y ago
> Edit2: They also have en_it lol I loved my old Android smartphone that had knew a en_DE locale. The English language with German date and number formatting was nice. It's a bit strange that those custom localization settings that have existed on Windows since at least XP are not available on some modern OSs/UIs.

felixfbecker 5y ago

Will be interesting which alliance they join. If they join Star Alliance and they truly will deliver on being a more premium airline I might try them out for a flight to Italy!

saargrin 5y ago

in this day and age,who cares if the service team on the aircraft are dressed in uniforms by famous designers?