It seems Alitalia is slowly getting back into gear after ceeding into new ownership, with it joining the Air France, KLM and Delta Transatlantic Joint Venutre programme where airlines share transatlantic revenues and costs to run Trans Atlantic flights (or TATL flights)
Alitalia being late to the party of course will have it’s membership of this Joint Venture backdated to 1st April.
This increases the Joint link by 20 services a day to Rome and Milan, linking up with Paris and Amsterdam in Europe – whilst in the USA feeding to New York, Detroit, Minneapolis and (my favourite airport in the world) Atlanta.
Alitalia hopes this will increase growth in this long term venture, which now includes 250 flights a day across the Atlantic with these 4 carriers, putting SkyTeam into a very powerful position. With the other alliances pooling resources together, this will squeeze out the smaller players, or force them to buddy up with a bigger alliance.
This expands on the orignal KLM/Northwest Airlines Anti-trust immuntity rulings (which is what the pact is based on) as opposed to the codeshare immunity (which is what most of SkyTeam runs on).
It’s good news for Alitalia, who have had their fair share of troubles over the years, and hopefully will improve their product as a result to at least match their fellow members in the alliance.
