Alitalia improves its punctuality

The one piece of positive news in months on Alitalia, Italy’s struggling national airline, is that the carrier’s punctuality has seen noticeable improvement over the course of the past four months. According to the Association of European Airlines (AEA), approximately 83.1 percent of Alitalia’s flights have arrived on schedule. In practice, the definition of punctuality means that the carrier’s flights arrived within 15 minutes of the scheduled time. In 2007, this same figure stood at only 78.8 percent.

Alitalia also seems to be doing well in comparison to the punctuality statistics of other European airlines. For example, Italy’s national carrier handily beat British Airways, which had a truly dismal punctuality rating of only 58.6 percent. It also performed much better than KLM; 64.7 percent of the Dutch airlines’ flights were on time. Moreover, Alitalia was also slightly more punctual than Spain’s Iberia (80.4 percent) and Lufthansa (80.8 percent).

As an added piece of good news, Alitalia’s flight regularity also showed impressive signs of improvement. Flight regularity simply allows the AEA to measure what percentage of all scheduled flights has been cancelled by an airline. In the case of Alitalia, these cancellations decreased by 26 percent. This latter figure is especially important, as it serves as a measure of a carrier’s reliability, something that Alitalia must go out of its way to cement and re-establish, after a sharp decline in bookings due to the uncertainty surrounding the airline’s future.

www.alitalia.com