The Milano slot story

During the recent days there has been some unclarity as regards Air Malta’s flights to Milan’s two airports.  While Air Malta has been stating that there are not enough desired slots available for summer, and thus one might have to re-allocate the flights.

While Linate, the city airport, is indeed one with quite a high demand of slots not least due to its convenient location for traffic destined or originating from the city itself, the more modern much bigger Malpensa, located to the north-west, is clearly under-utilized and should surely not find too big problems to accommodate Air Malta, after all a very long time customer. 

The market (Air Malta and Easyjet serving the two Milan airports) might be feeling the capacity and yield pressure coming in with Ryanair from Milan-Bergamo.  This airport might not be as near to the city as Linate, but is the same distance as Malpensa, and surely is not a total inconvenience.  Furthermore it also taps more on the eastern side of Milan in a much better way. 

And here we come to one of the alternative airports that Air Malta is reportedly considering: apart from Verona, located half-way roughly between Bergamo and Treviso (two Ryanair airports), there is Parma.

Flying to Don Camillo’s airport?

In 2005 Parma actually had a weekly Malta service, operated by a small airline called Club Air (combined with Lampedusa), using Avroliners.  Club Air also ran a weekly flight from Verona. The carrier had in 2006, and then some years later again, ceased operations.  In the end they had one ex-Azzurra Air  Avro RJ85 and one ex-Air Malta, ex-Azzurra, Avro RJ70.  The carrier had actually leased the three ex-Azzurra RJ85s until their first (2006) collapse. 

By the way, ‘il piccolo mondo’ Brescello, the town of ‘Don Camillo and Peppone’, is just a 25km drive from Parma airport. 

Certainly it is a niche source market, one could try it, and there is nothing actually wrong with smaller airports – usually it means cheaper parking and short ways for luggage and to walk.  Be it for short trips, or for families with small children, or elderly passengers, all surely would be glad to ‘fly from one’s doorstep’. 

However, Parma area is surrounded by three Ryanair airports all linked to Malta: Bologna, Pisa, and Bergamo, all within easy autostrada range from Parma (about 100kms) and the towns and villages around it.  That means that the catchment area, which actually is not that densely populated, is actually already covered.

 Furthermore, while Milan Malpensa and Linate, and to some extent also Verona, offer the possibility to also load some transit passengers e.g. from Lufthansa group feeders (be it LH itself or Air Dolomiti), Parma would be a pure point-to-point route, meaning traffic has to be generated locally exclusively.  The flights to there are just from Trapani/western Sicily and Cagliari of Sardinia, both also serving the domestic migrant friends and relatives traffic, as well as a Ryanair link from London.  Otherwise this is more a business regional airport.  So even if offered some incentive, and saving a bit on the trip costs compared to Milan, one has to be really sure that the flight would work before deciding for it.

Something one has to be careful about regional summer routes from Italy that one attempts to focus on ‘weekend trips’ is that, with exactly those weekend trips, one has quite uneven load factors -the flights north towards the end of the week and the flights south towards the end of the weekend might have much lower loadfactors than the core end of week southbound and end of weekend northbound flights. 

Certainly occupying such niches can create some extra demand as people want to make use of the opportunity, the innovation.  Still, with an Airbus means one has to fill double as many seats as on an Avroliner. 

Vueling’s Rome route

As TMBW reported some time ago, Vueling, the Spanish low-cost brand of Iberia/British Airways (IAG), will take up a triple weekly service to Malta from Rome as from next summer schedule.  IAG try to attack the ailing Alitalia by opening a base there and opening a number of routes operated in parallel to Alitalia, one of them being Malta.

The report did not give any information whether the involved local stakeholders have provided any kind of ‘marketing support‘ or what else.  Given the fact that this route is anything but new or so, with the three carriers operating on it already struggling to fill their seats, this should be left entirely to the market. 

One might presume that active acquisition could have been done in fear of an Alitalia meltdown of the route (or even in total), which thankfully is now again unlikely to happen soon. 

While British Airways’ link from Gatwick is just yet another a pure point-to-point service just eating into the array of carriers already plying the London-Malta route, Alitalia’s service is of far higher network connectivity value for Malta thanks to the connections provided in Rome by Alitalia itself, plus its SkyTeam partner airlines such as Aeroflot or Delta.  One should not destroy this link to accommodate the Anglo-Iberian IAG’s low-cost brand.  The route is also a key route for Air Malta right since 1974 and Air Malta’s financial turn-around is paramount. 

Not that Air Malta has not been doing quite some things all on its own to hinder its profits (from eccentric routes, to outsourcing for the sake of it, to fuel purchase issues, to putting fares in levels that clearly nobody wanted to buy, to cutting down on exactly parts of the organisation that brought the contracts), and of course add to this many spokes put into its wheels from the outside for far too many years - from ill-chosen fleet decisions to routes to facing highly subsidized parallel flights. 

Then towards the end of last year we could also read stories in the papers of certain persons being given tons of cash for ‘services’ that, despite all the cash, must have been so tiny that right the same persons first ‘forgot’ about them - all from the same airline whose management otherwise always was quick to state that it was such a poor airline, depending of course. 

Then again one could also recently read about how the Arriva routes, no comment better on those, were developed, and where several hundreds of thousands went for this service.  Clearly money was no problem - depending for whom. 

With Air Malta, Alitalia and Easyjet one should have had a more than wide and solid base for the Rome market.  Definitely they would want to add capacity themselves.  Especially Alitalia has been flooding the market with very low fares.  Adding more capacity increases pressure on the two financially severed flag carriers and Easyjet. 

Clearly the priority must always be tapping genuinely new markets. 

With IAG one has even the group of airlines who reportedly ran to Brussels asking for the Air Malta rescue package not to pass and thus pressing for Air Malta to collapse.  With Air Malta, contrasting airlines from abroad, staff pay their tax locally and contribute to the local economy also directly, add the contribution due to keeping markets also open in winter for tourism and economy while other airlines would not fly those routes for sure during that period of the year at least.  Just look at the plight of hotels (and hotel workers) on all other Mediterranean islands without resident flag carrier – from Ibiza to Corfu and Crete, better not mention the less prominent ones from Karpathos to Minorca.

Funnily enough now, despite this very un-collegial move from BA’s parent holding, instead of routing UK originated transit traffic via Air Malta’s Lufthansa group hubs Brussels, Zurich, or Frankfurt, with the according LH group feeder, or SkyTeam’s Air France/KLM’s superb network opportunities with Amsterdam and Charles DeGaulle, or teaming up with UK regional specialist FlyBe, Air Malta now offers its connections via overcrowded Gatwick with British Airways feeders, from e.g. Glasgow. 

Then again Air Malta’s own Gatwick flights might feel some crowding out due to the new parallel flight installed by British Airways aimed at the inclusive tour market.  So, one must fill those potentially vacant Gatwick seats with seats fed into the Air Malta flight via the BA network.  Which means one then has to see from where to fill those seats that usually got sold like this via western continental hubs.  Happy merry-go-round.

A very good step that Air Malta has taken with the Glasgow route, is putting also British ‘charter’ route seats on sale on its normal regular website.  This should be pursued further.  Any additional distribution channel is a plus not just for the carrier but also the destination.