Alitalia is short of money and this is no surprise since their flights are expensive and the quality is low. To give you an example, I flew to Miami in May and my luggage was broken during the flight. I immediately filed a complaint in Miami, as suggested in Miami I kept my copy and waited to be back in Milan. Once in back in Malpensa 2 weeks after I went to the “lost and found” desk to seek for some extra support. They gave me a fax number and told me to send me boarding card a copy of the filed complaint and a copy of my ID. I did so on Wed, June 6th (5 days later). On Sept, 18 I received a letter from Alitalia’s attorneys saying that unfortunately they may not accept my request because more than 7 days had gone from when I filed the complaint and when I sent them a copy via FAX. I obviously did not think of taking the trouble of faxing them while on holiday and did it as soon as I got back home. I had 7 days to let them know. They took 3 months to answer to me. Sounds a bit unbalanced. I fly quite often these days and Alitalia’s airplanes are the oldest and dirtiest.
Nevertheless they are short of money and this is probably because the company is led by corporations and politicians and not people who know about business.
They think Malpensa is a source of costs more than of revenues. They are now planning to cancel about 150 routes.
The industry has a reply to this move: EasyJet has doubled the flights to and from Malpensa, RyanAir wants to spend 850M Euro over 5 years to expand their routes adding *80* new to the existing ones.
I wonder if EasyJet and RyanAir would invest money on an airport that would not assure them to fill every single flight.
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