The surprises just keep coming in Italy’s airspace, with an announcement by the new ITA Airways that it will not, after all, use the name and marks of Alitalia, the airline it replaces, even though it paid €90 million for the right to do so.
And once it starts getting new planes of its own, it will abandon the Alitalia livery painted on many of its planes, keeping only the green-white-red stripe of Italy’s colors on its tail; the rest will be painted sky-blue. The company says it bought the Alitalia marks only to keep someone else from using them.
ITA’s other big announcement: it intends to join the Sky Team alliance to which Alitalia had previously belonged, along with Delta, AirFrance/KLM and other. It is starting up a new loyalty program called Volare to replace Alitalia’s MilleMiglia program, and says it will be possible to transfer points to it, but without specifying which programs, and whether that would include MilleMiglia.
As to claims that it’s doomed to fail because it’s not following the Ryanair/Wizz/Easyjet ultra low-cost model, ITA’s new president says “I fly planes and people, they transport chickens in cages” and questioned whether they would actually be profitable without incentives he says they receive from airports.
