JFC Travel Blog

Lufthansa has announced that they’ll be starting direct flights from London Heathrow to Milan Malpensa from 29th March 2009. The flights are part of Lufthansa’s strategy to get more involved in the Italian market and create another hub at Malpensa airport.This route will directly compete with Alitalia’s Heathrow to Milan Linate service. Linate is closer to the centre of Milan but Lufthansa will be competing on price and service.

Currently Alitalia is in the process of restructuring and the plan is for an Italian consortium (CAI) to take over the good assets of Alitalia while leaving the loss making parts of the company in state control. The loss making parts of the company would then be closed, effectively leaving the debt with the Italian taxpayer. The profitable parts of the company would then be merged with Air One and this would launch the ‘new’ Alitalia owned by CAI.

CAI intends to have a foreign partner. Lufthansa and Air France-KLM have been shortlisted for this position. If Air France is selected then the new Alitalia will remain in the SkyTeam alliance, if Lufthansa is selected then Alitalia will likely leave SkyTeam at the first opportunity and join Star Alliance.

The introduction of this new route shows that Lufthansa are not waiting to see the results of Alitalia’s restructuring before getting involved in the Italian market.

I hope the future sees Alitalia remain in SkyTeam then I will have a choice of alliance and frequent flyer scheme on my trips to Italy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 12:43 pm and is filed under SkyTeam, Star Alliance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.