By Joseph M. Calisi © 2022 All Rights Reserved
March 4, 2022
Subsequent to the turnover from Alitalia to Ita Airways back on October 15 with the first flight to New York’s JFK Airport, some of the routes inherited from Alitalia were not used until the late winter or early Spring of 2022.
With the advent of the coming summer travel season and the reduction of flight restrictions, more flights are being scheduled overall.
In the case of Boston, round trips will be increased from 2 to 5 weekday trips in April and increased again to 6 in May and finally daily trippers from June thru October:
- Rome-Boston: Wednesday, Saturday; AZ614, 10:20-14:00
- Boston-Rome: Wednesday, Saturday; AZ615, 17:10-07:00+1
The daily round trips will be reduced to 5 beginning in November.
Boston’s schedule is currently slotted at 2 times weekly but that will rise to 5 weeklies in April, and 6 weekly in May, and increasing to daily from June-October, before reducing to 5 weeklies from November onwards.
Miami, another port that was used by Alitalia, a similar escalation will occur. Currently, the 3 weekly trips will be increased to 5 weeklies in April and daily from June onward which will continue through the winter into 2023:
- Rome-Miami: Tuesday, Friday, Sunday; AZ630, 11:00-17:40
- Miami-Rome: Tuesday, Friday, Sunday; AZ631, 20:40-11:30+1
The question becomes, will ITA be able to match or supersede Alitalia’s 2019 loads on 7 US routes? Here are the targets to be met (by passengers and seat load factor (SLF) using the DOT’s T-100 data:
In pre-pandemic 2019, Alitalia had seven US routes, as detailed below
Rome-JFK: 470,699 round-trip passengers; 85.9% SLF
Rome-Miami: 153,460; 85.1%
Milan-JFK: 141,657; 80.2%
Rome-Los Angeles: 127,402; 88.0%
Rome-Boston: 120,090; 84.1%
Rome-Washington: 56,265; 72.3%
Rome-Chicago: 51,960; 84.2%
As a start-up, these numbers will initially be hard to match and must be increased going down the road in order to reach profitability. That’s the standard for viability that’s complicated if the arrival of the Airbus A350 airliners are on time.
