Think twice about booking on Alitalia

Sheron,

Thank you for posting the article on Alitalia. What a shame. We had a great flight from Rome to LAX on Alitalia. I hope anyone who is planning a trip to Italy will read this article.

Unfortunately the Italian Government will probably find a way to bail them out, at the taxpayers' expense.

That airline should have died 10 years ago and fully sold to Air France. But Berlusconi wanted to prove he could save it from the bad French and organized a group of Italian entrepreneurs saviors to save it without help from foreign firms. They failed and eventually they had to call Etihad to save it. But EU rules bar them from having more that 49% stake in the company.

Now the company wants to cut payroll costs but the strong unions disagree and go on strike. The government of course sides with the unions but the fact remains that Alitalia pilots, for example, earn almost twice as much as those of RyanAir, which has now taken over the Italian market. The unions just had a major strike last week because workers were asked to accept 24 fewer days off a year? What? 24 days is more than Americans get in total between vacation and holidays. How many days off do workers get at Alitalia?

Liquidation would be the only solution. But once again it will be the Italian taxpayers to pay the price of bailing out a privileged cast of overpaid bus drivers.

LOL. Alitalia has been in dire straits for so long that gloom-and-doom predictions are their normal!

I think it is a little reassuring to know some very big players code share flights on many of Alitalia's routes and cannot imagine would just cancel booked flights for later this year and leave their customer bases hanging.
Delta, KLM and I think others book Alitalia flights as if they are their own on their websites, so on a typical Alitalia direct flight from the US to Italy only a percentage of those are booked via Alitalia.
My point being Delta may carry out the flights themselves should something major happen.