Originally Posted by
rje444
Wow, getting nervous! We have award tickets for September 2017, JFK-FCO and FCO-VCE, and then a return flight about 5 weeks later FCO-JFK.
Booked with MR points transferred from AmEx, so if Alitalia does go out of business, I guess we'd lose them all, which would be painful, as we are retired and it takes us a long time to accumulate miles/points.
And worse, the prospect of losing a trip my wife has been dreaming about for years.
Of course this focus on our trip is not to minimize how terrible this would be for all the Alitalia employees and their families.
But specifically to our trip, how worried do you all think should we be?
Originally Posted by
jbeans
I have JFK - FCO roundtrip award tix booked for late May. Fingers crossed that this route will not be one of the first to go?
Understandable concerns from you both, mainly considering the current state-of-play. More details concerning the future of the airline will probably be unveiled in the days to come as the CEO is currently presenting (internally) a plan which is (at least theoretically speaking) supposed to put a halt to the current financial haemorrhage. There are rumours (nothing new, really, but they become increasingly insistent as the board discusses the above) that a number of 320 aircraft will be grounded and over 2000 employees (ground, cabin and pilots) dismissed (that'll not go down very well with the Italian unions, but...), possibly meaning a further cutback in domestic services and I suspect also some other medium-haul flights, following the trend of the last few months (see also
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/alita...justments.html). On a brighter note, it seems that extra capacity will be added to long-haul routes (an additional 777 has literally just been delivered, MEX will become daily as of July etc.) and, as I've already stated above and elsewhere in other threads,
if any further service reduction will take place, I strongly doubt it will affect the likes of JFK, mainly from their main hub, FCO.
G