Italy’s latest airline startup has just announced the initial network from its second base: Bergamo, an airport that serves the Milan metropolitan area.
The flights will carry passengers between the Northern city to Catania, in Sicily, five times a week, and to Rome/Fiumicino with up to three flights a day. The routes will begin, respectively, on December the 2nd and on November 14th.
This next move is a surprising step to the airline, that currently flies charter operations and a number of daily flights from Forlì, in the Emilia-Romagna region, with a fleet of three Boeing 737-800.
While the Forlì base has seen a drastic reduction in schedules — in fact, it is not selling any tickets from there beyond October — the airline has been leasing a smaller aircraft to run most of that operation. Starting today, the first ATR from Romania’s AirConnect started to operate flights on behalf of Aeroitalia, according to BoardingPass.ro, Romania’s largest aviation website.
With that, Bergamo will remain, for now, Aeroitalia’s sole base, and in two routes that will face dire competition, each of the two for a different reason.
The sole airline to serve Milan and Rome, ITA Airways is operating about ten daily frequencies from its hub in Rome/Fiumicino to Milan/Linate this month, according to Cirium’s Diio Mi application. But even this is a far cry from September 2012, when the capacity of its predecessor Alitalia between both airports was more than double that.
And that’s because back then Alitalia also connected Fiumicino to Malpensa with some four daily frequencies; both easyJet and Ryanair also took part in the route; the British low-cost carrier connected Fiumicino and Malpensa about four times a day, while the Irish airline connected Bergamo and Ciampino twice daily, with Fiumicino connected to Bergamo some five times a week.
The reason why one of Europe’s most important air travel connections ten years ago is down over 70% today is simple: high-speed rail. One of the most popular articles of the time when Alitalia shut down last year, coined by CNN, said that that’s what «killed Alitalia», citing specifically the Milan-Rome city pair.
Still, Aeroitalia will try and fight this trend by providing more convenient frequency; three daily flights to counter the single run — each — of the Frecciarossa and of Italo from Bergamo to Rome.
Now onto the other route the Italian startup announced, it also gets tricky due to the competition Aeroitalia will face.
Bergamo is Ryanair’s third-largest base, after London/Stansted and Dublin only, and it’s the largest base in Italy for the Irish group. More specifically, Bergamo-Catania is a route where the airline dominates. It is in its top 10 markets from Bergamo by capacity, and it is the only player there, with three daily operations in each direction.
Ryanair is renowned for being very protective of its home markets, and it is definitely very bold of Aeroitalia, small and definitely without scale to be competitive in cost, of going straight to an important route for its competitor, instead of trying to serve somewhere else.
While they tried to avoid Ryanair outright in its first batch of routes from Forlì, now the airline is doing the exact opposite. Be it with the high-speed rail or going directly against the continent’s largest low-cost carrier, Aeroitalia definitely gave itself a hard time for its next challenge.
