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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.
Clearly this man has never flown United...
> "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
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".
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how many of the 7K people were just moving papers around...
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.
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.
Oh wait ...
> 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?
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).
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
The Irish national airline would be Aer Lingus.
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 works, but the browser is redirected using another language code.
Edit2: They also have en_it lol