Aeroitalia, Italy’s newest private airline venture, has put on sale tickets for the first destinations from its new base in Florence. As Aviacionline has published last week, the company expects to start up in the Tuscan airport by basing a Boeing 737-700 — a new type in the airline’s fleet — and a wet-leased ATR 72-600.
As such, from late December of this year the airline will launch operations from Florence to Bucharest, Catania in Sicily and London’s Heathrow Airport. Trapani already counts with flights to the city, albeit with an aircraft that is not based in Florence.
The destinations count with fares for as little as EUR24.99 (one-way to the four destinations). Flights to Catania will be daily; frequencies to Bucharest will be operated on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; flights to Heathrow will be operated daily except on Tuesdays and Saturdays; and the flights to Trapani happen on Thursdays and Sundays.
As mentioned by Aviacionline earlier this month, Florence Airport is in a privileged position for the airlines that can operate there as the short runway blocks most of the low-cost carriers to serve it with their Airbus A320s and Boeing 737-800s. Instead, LCCs operate from Pisa, a two-hour train’s away.
As such, Vueling is currently the most important airline in the terminal, albeit Volotea will be the first LCC to try basing aircraft in Florence, starting with an A319 next Summer.
Meanwhile, Aeroitalia is trying to make its routes work by catering to underserved routes in Italy. This does not mean the company avoids competitions at all costs; in fact, its largest base currently is Bergamo — Ryanair’s third-largest base and its largest in Italy.
The rationale of that is to connect airports that are not directly served by Ryanair from Bergamo, such as London/Heathrow and Rome/Fiumicino — as it is very unlikely, if not impossible, that Aeroitalia can beat Ryanair on cost alone.
Beyond Florence and Bergamo, Aeroitalia’s CEO, Gaetano Intrieri, mentioned in a Facebook post to former Alitalia workers that the airline expects to open «30 other destinations from Milan [Bergamo] and [ten] from Rome [Fiumicino]» from the next Summer season.
In the same post, Intrieri said that Aeroitalia plans to serve Prague, a destination that was not mentioned before, nor one that is on sale by the airline.
