In the past I have written a lot about Alitalia, Italy’s “national” airline: https://blog.therealitaly.com/?s=alitalia&submit=Search It’s emblematic of the country in more ways than one, and the inability to resolve the problem one way or the other is like a lot of things here.  Rather than letting the thing finally fail and seeing what takes its…

For those wondering what has become of the "new Alitalia", it can best be described as hurtling down the runway, but not gaining a lot of altitude.  The "sale" has been closed, although there is still a lot of union activity going on that’s quite disruptive – apparently a number of people missed their Christmas…

Like the monster from a cheap horror movie, Alitalia reared its ugly head on Haloween.  The threat this time is that the negotiations to implement what everyone signed up for in principle broke down, and over the past couple of weeks, the battle has been joined once again.  Most of the main unions are more…

The latest this weekend was the news that the pilots’ union signed up, leaving only the flight attendants to sign the agreement, which at this point seems highly likely (Update: they signed). The only big question left is: who will be the foreign partner in the deal, Lufthansa or Air France? So it looks as…

There’s still no deal, no collapse, nothing certain, but since one more union signed up to the deal offered by the “courageous entrepreneurs” of CAI, Alitalia is still flying, despite having had Thursday as a “deadline”. There are a few more unions still holding out: pilots, flight assistants and a few others. The new deadline…

Well, if not her, Berlusconi is still talking up a storm. The latest “deadline” is supposed to be tomorrow, Thursday, after which Alitalia will stop flying. Of course, these “deadlines” don’t have much credibility, but sooner or later there will be a real one, and this one looks to have some force behind it. As…

Today’s Alitalia news: As mentioned yesterday, Alitalia has finally gone ahead and started trying to sell off the good bits in something akin to an auction, something that should have happened a long time ago. At this point, it’s going to be pretty dicey to put much together, as the deadline is the 30th of…

Unless something happens behind the scenes with negotiations between the unions and the “good company” CAI (the “courageous” entrepreneurs who kindly offered to buy all of the good bits of Alitalia), it looks like the “good company” has been ditched at the altar. With less than a week to go, Alitalia is going up for…

The group of investors who were ready to sweep up all the good, productive, moneymaking parts of Alitalia (being a businessman with government connections in Italy is sure a tough job) appear to have withdrawn their offer after they failed to come to an agreement with unions: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/BUSINESS/09/18/alitalia.financial.trouble/index.html The latest, in Italian, from the Corriere…

Monday, supposedly the day when flights would start being canceled has come and gone. It’s now Tuesday evening, and things still appear to be running. Negotiations with the unions are still going on, even though they appear to not be going well. The situation is likely to be one of these, but only time will…