Air One has furiously denounced Alitalia”s plan to slash services from Milan Malpensa airport and has put forward a rival plan to rejeuvenate the northern destination.
Alitalia plans to axe a substantial number of services from Milan as it retrenches to Rome Fiumicino in a bid to stem enormous losses that are seeing the Italian airline bleed ”1m ($1.46m) per day.
”We are immediately ready to be the main Malpensa operator thanks to our plan for Alitalia, which foresees not only keeping it active, but furthering its development on an intercontinental scale,” said an Air One spokesman.
”We are convinced that the country cannot do without a strategic airport such as Malpensa: the north is an important market with the most important intercontinental business passengers and there is great potential for growth. It is for this reason that our five year Air One ”Stand Alone” plan, developed two years ago, includes the launching of our national and intercontinental operations from Malpensa only a few months from now.”
Alitalia”s move ” coming hot on the heels of Italy”s latest government collapse ” is also slap in the middle of talks between the State and an Air France-KLM bid for the carrier that has raised union hackles in the country.
A snapshot into just how parlous a state Alitalia has fallen can be gleaned from a statement that justifies the airline”s decision to withdraw substantially from Malpensa.
”The new network, that can”t be deferred, is the result of compulsory choices dictated by a trend of accumulated losses, together with prospects that are less and less sustainable,” it said. ”There is the impossibility for the company, as things stand, to manage two hubs efficiently and productively.”
The move has angered not only trade unionists but has also apparently whipped up strong political feeling in the north, which has long had a separatist tendency to that of Rome.
But Alitalia justifies its move on the basis that most traffic at Malpensa is transit-based and it needs to concentrate its firepower on point to point services, even raising the possibility of re-instating Rome-Los Angeles rotations.
Rome is naturally the most significant catchment area for Alitalia, being the third-largest European market after London and Paris, while the carrier adds that 62% of passengers originating from the Milan district and 92% from Northern Italy, do not use Malpensa as their departure airport for intercontinental flights.
This has cut no ice with Air One however, which has issued a patriotic appeal to Italians. ”We are ready to defend the future of national air transport together with the other entrepreneurial communities all over the country,” it noted.