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Italy reveals its new national airline

cnn.com

41–50 of 52 posts

Re: Italy reveals its new national airline

#41

In perfect italian development style, their website 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 ) 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 works, but the browser is…

> 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.

Re: Italy reveals its new national airline

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Italy reveals its new national airline

#43

> 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...

What are you hinting at? Does excessive linking of satisfaction with compensation result in unethical prostitution?

Re: Italy reveals its new national airline

#44

> 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...

What are you hinting at? Does excessive linking of satisfaction with compensation result in unethical prostitution?

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-...

Re: Italy reveals its new national airline

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

This. Thai airways

Re: Italy reveals its new national airline

#47
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tourism has nothing to do with national airlines. Mass tourism in Europe is due more to Ryanair than to anything else. The Irish national airline would be Aer Lingus.

Ryanair, train, flixbus, ...

Re: Italy reveals its new national airline

#48

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…

What's a "frugal Irishman" image? Ever heard of the Celtic tiger? Irish people are not frugal as a trait.. to their own demise.

Re: Italy reveals its new national airline

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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, cookin…

There is a lot to unpack there. I'm not defending Alitalia, it is/was a company I rarely chose given there were more affordable choices that I preferred like Ryanair/Easyjet/Vueling/Wizzair. I dislike Alitalia as much as I disliked the older airlines with more expensive tickets like KLM, AirFrance,British Airways,Lufthansa,Iberia,...

ALITALIA WAS NOT ALWAYS LATE:

I've tried to search for statistics about airlines and Alitalia seemed not to be particularly bad:

Here it Alitalia it appears in the top 20 on time airlines with values very close to the others: https://www.oag.com/hubfs/Free_Reports/Punctuality_League/20...

Alitalia does not figure in several articles about the 5 least on time airlines: https://www.flight-delayed.co.uk/blog/2020/02/18/the-most-de...

My point here is that we must be objective about performance. Saying Alitalia was this much slow on that year is objective. It's a measureable metric. Repeating acronynims like

ALITALIA Always Late I Takeoff Always Late In Arrival

FIAT fix it again tony

it's not objective, it's just a joke based on the stereotype of Italians being incapable of technical achievements.

Italians generally are the first to roast Italy but they do so not objectively. We should criticize our own faults in order to discover them and improve them. But we should also check if what we are criticizing is actually that bad because frankly in most instances it's not that bad and in some cases is actually very good. Definitely Alitalia didn't shine and we could and should do better but Alitalia it was statistically NOT always late.

Re: Italy reveals its new national airline

#50

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…

> Ryanair promotes the "frugal Irishman" image.

Huh? As an Irish person, I have never heard of this frugal Irishman image, can you clarify?

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