While our financial institutions here in the US prepare to write their own obituaries. The Italian government is busy trying make sure that their flag carrier's wings don't get clipped.
Richard Branson says that they shouldn't be bailed out, but flag carriers and their significance mean that you cannot make a decision on their welfare without bringing emotion into play.
Earlier this Spring, the Fiance stated to me--in a very blunt Australian way--that he made a concerted effort to fly Qantas from New York to Sydney, because "it was like coming home." It's the same reason why I try to fly the occasional Midwest Airlines* flight back to Milwaukee. (Hell, I'll likely fly a US carrier back to US from Australia as time goes on.) There is still that emotional aspect to air travel, and quite frankly, the industry needs to remember that.
*I don't even want to think about Midwest's woes at the moment.
Back to Alitalia.
The merger plan which involves merging it with Air One (the 2nd biggest carrier in Italy), seems like the lesser of two evils plan to me. For those who saw the absurd growth and then garroting of the venerable Eastern & Pan Am (mk.I)--not to mention the weird rise of US Airways (ne Allegheny/Piedmont/PSA), we know airline mergers are rarely smooth, and often not always entered into with long-term effects in mind.
Now, I don't know much about Air One from personal experience, but Skytrax reviewers (a curmudgeonly lot, I will say) paint a picture of a lean operation where flight attendants seem to double as food & goods sellers. It has been twentysome years since I've flown Alitalia, but when I was in Italy this past summer, Alitalia did the check-in for my flight and gave me a pass to their lounge. The check-in personnel were good, friendly, perhaps a bit blase about their jobs. The lounge, however, was woeful, especially since this was Rome Airport. It looked like someone took some 1960s suburban office, slapped in a few coffee makers and departure screens and left. That's faded glamour on a Norma Desmond scale.
So I don't think that the young cost cutter and the old diva with laryngitis are going to make a good couple, but it looks time isn't on anyone's side in this situation.
What exactly got Alitalia into this mess? A mishmash of peculiar regulations (including a bizarre "you must live in Rome" rule), union leaders being arrogant, and executives keen on avoiding any major decisions that might actually allow the airline to be competitive. If you think I'm drawing a comparison here between the woes of Alitalia and the woes of some major US firms (toot toot, beep beep), then you're spot on.
It's hard for any entity, particularly one--whether it was "private" like Pan Am or effectively state-owned like Alitalia--to adjust out of a "chosen instrument" status even in the face of impending corporate death or at least radical restructuring.
The harsh sunlight that the new Alitalia walks into, should be watched by every single CEO on the planet.
3 comments:
arguably, there's one important difference between the airline industry and wall street: the failure of the former cannot hurt the latter, but the failure of the latter can (and does) hurt the former. so, although it's one thing to let alitalia go the way of panam, it's quite another to let a big wall street firm to fail (as evidenced by all the handwringing over lehman brothers, which the government couldn't save without creating also "moral hazard").
Corporate socialism dressed as free market is the way of the world these days..
Taxpayers giving welfare to capitalists is something you couldn't make up, but that's the reality now.
The interesting connection to Italy is that it was there that the corporate state was first defined by Mussolini in the 30's and it's back.
Remains to be seen if it will evolve to the same brutality, but then I guess most Iraqi will agree and so will probably the 2 million+ US inmates. (even workers and homeowners might want to have a say too..)
it appears that alitalia has been saved\ -- miraculously.
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