the London slots rented by Etihad-Corriere.it are too expensive

Ita Airways has returned to Etihad the 54 weekly slots at London Heathrow airport – rented at a high price -, while the exclusive Tesoro-Lufthansa negotiation on the entry of the German company into the Italian one continues. The decision will take effect from next summer season, so Ita will continue to offer connections for a while longer. This period will also serve the company to find other – and less expensive – take-off and landing rights, perhaps taking advantage of the Flybe bankruptcy. And it is not excluded that it is the Lufthansa group that is giving some since for the next peak season it will have as many as 718 every week.

The decision

The move of the Italian carrier on one of the most important airports in the world was notified last November 15 according to the law Courier on the notices of the UK slots regulator. This is immediately after Alfredo Altavilla’s step back from the presidency of Ita and a few hours before the appointment of the current president Antonino Turicchi who is managing the negotiations with Lufthansa. The documentation shows that Ita will return the 54 weekly slots at the end of March – used to operate eight daily round-trip flights from Rome Fiumicino/Milan Linate-London Heathrow – owned by Etihad.

The history of these rights

These slots have a particular history. They were actually from Alitalia (which had 68). But when Etihad entered the Italian company (with 49%) in 2016, all take-off and landing rights passed to the UAE carrier through an operation which – according to official documents – had generated a capital gain of 39 million euros for Alitalia. At that point Etihad re-handed them over to Alitalia but under lease. As revealed by the Courier in 2019, to use those time slots, the then extraordinary administration of Alitalia gave the Emirates 3.76 million euros a year, i.e. over 10,000 euros a day or 1,059 euros per arriving or departing aircraft.

The passage Alitalia-Ita

When Ita bought the aviation branch of Alitalia in 2021, it also inherited the leasing contract for those 68 slots, but in the 2022 summer and winter seasons it preferred to keep 54 also because in the meantime traffic had not yet returned to the levels prior to the pandemic. It is not clear how much he paid them, but those who know the Heathrow exchange explain that the daily price should be between 7 and 9 thousand euros a day. The documents also show that for the 2023 summer season (which starts on March 26 and ends on October 29) Ita has requested 84 weekly slots, but the British regulator has not awarded even one, which has also been done with other carriers.

In London City

Etihad’s slots, other documents from the British regulator confirm, have already been leased to other airlines: on January 5, two daily take-off and landing rights were turned over to JetBlue, four to American Airlines on January 18, and another two to British Airways on 27 January. As for Ita, he can certainly use the 48 weekly slots he holds in another London airport, London City, but he finds himself paying the consequences of Alitalia managed by Etihad years later.