Italy reveals its new national airline | Hacker News Reader

Italy reveals its new national airline

cnn.com

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.

Come on mate what's with the pessimism. When did the rich upper class of Italy fail to deliver for the remaining 99% of Italy?

Oh wait ...

>> They've long dominated the food and fashion worlds, this year they've dominated sports, and now they're aiming for the skies.

Being the best at something wins you a prize. It rarely ever means market share. Italy has a great football team, but what percentage of world football is played there? They certainly have all the best fashion, but what percentage of the world's clothing is manufactured in Italy? This philosophy will not translate well to air travel. Having the best planes and the best staff in the world means little compared to having the lowest price and best on-time performance.

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 that country. Especially when the whole thing is wrapped with strong nationalism masked as pride.

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 stunts.

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, ...

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

> branding of national airlines is a cornerstone for tourism...

Thank you, your comment made me see a bigger picture.

> Ryanair promotes the "frugal Irishman" image.

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

Completely agree with you, this journalist’s bs is not really helping anyone to be thoroughly informed about the situation.

> 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?

> Isn’t this just a rebranding of a restructuring?

Yes.

IAC Aircraft Painting has done one aircraft paint job for ITA, but most of the fleet will bear the old Alitalia logo for a while.[1]

Big layoffs. Alitalia had around 10,000 employees; ITA will start with about 2,800.

[1] https://www.italy24news.com/business/219410.html

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).

Alitalia used to be very expensive and much worse than Ryanair. Personnel was extremely rude and unprofessional, they were striking more often than not, they were as unreliable as EasyJet if not worse.

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.

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 redirected using another language code.

Edit2: They also have en_it lol

> 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.

Is it bad that when I hear ITA, I think of the airline pricing optimization software system that Google bought?

Same here.

> "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

Airbus use a number of Italian suppliers [1]. Not 100% Italian made, but probably supporting more Italian jobs than buying Boeing.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?channel=trow5&client=firefox-b...

That might make it difficult to obtain fuel at airports outside of Italy. Even if he was only referring to their operations within Italy, good luck doing anything in Europe without dealing with cross-border entities.

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 is a country of 60 millions people. There are a LOT of people good and bad at many things. As an Italian Software Engineer I personally struggle through life because of this. It's a constant battle to fight stereotypes imposed on me by both foreigners and other italians that just think "fuck it, if they think we are only good at that then we'll dress up and give them a show".

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, 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.

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.

So they rebranded to "Always Takeoff Arrival".

> They've long dominated the food and fashion worlds, this year they've dominated sports, and now they're aiming for the skies.

This is a joke perhaps?

At least they won the Euro 2020 this summer, but were they successful in the Olympics too?

Not in terms of medals but the 100m sprint is a significant achievement.

I hear they had a decent empire going at some point also. Somebody should let this journalist know.

> 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-...

Excessive investment of one's pension fund in the airline itself makes for some very disgruntled employees working well past the average age of retirement. United managed to shift a lot of it's post 9/11 losses onto the employee pension fund as a result of the union buy-in to company ownership.

"We are running different businesses. I fly people and they fly battery chicken farms,"

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.

"The planes will resemble what you’d expect a pasta-flavored energy drink to look like. And to show you that this will be a real business, we paid all $2 of our marketing budget for this Photoshop file."

Will be interesting which alliance they join. If they join Star Alliance and they truly will deliver on being a more premium airline I might try them out for a flight to Italy!

Portugal national airliner TAP, that is also a black hole of tax payers money, should have the same faith as Alitalia.

All fine. Too bad in the process over 7000 people lost their jobs.

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.

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.

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

Better 7000 than all 10, surely.

> everything will be centopercento italiano.

Except the aircraft...

looks like a bankruptcy reorganization (similar to Chapter 11)

Free hand to layoff staff and let go of debts so they can have a "new start"

in this day and age,who cares if the service team on the aircraft are dressed in uniforms by famous designers?

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