Just remember, today is your last chance to vote in the 2008 Weblog Awards. You can vote once per day, so even if you’ve voted before, head on back and do it one more time. Voting ends at:

9a in Sydney (Jan 14)
7a in Tokyo (Jan 14)
10p in London
5p in New York
2p in Los Angeles
12n in Honolulu

My guess is that it’ll be a close race all the way to the end, so make sure you head over and vote for the blog you like best.

http://2008.weblogawards.org/polls/best-travel-blog/

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

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Hallelujah! It’s official. Alitalia is born again. Praise Silvio! Last night, the last “old” Alitalia flight landed and the airline completely shut down for a few hours in order to get some sort of certification change. This morning, Alitalia woke up merged with Air One under the “new” Alitalia name. That means we need a new “worst airline ever.” Yes, that honor will now be bestowed upon . . . the “new” Alitalia. I’m operating under the premise that they are guilty until proven innocent.

And why would I automatically pass it on to the new Alitalia? Well not much is changing yet. Yes, we have a new, smaller Alitalia that now owns Air One as well. The combined airlines will continue to operate separately for now, but they’re beginning to merge pieces together. But most importantly, we still have those oh-so-stubborn unions which are still rattling their sabres, hoping for a miracle to save all their jobs. There’s probably only room for one miracle here, and that’s the fact that Alitalia still exists. Instead, we’ll see protests all day long and maybe even a strike or two considering how things work over there.

Oh, and there is one other big piece of news. Alitalia has now officially chosen Air France as the winner of the ownership lottery. For a mere 323 million euros, Air France gets 25 percent of the airline. Looks like the French have succeeded in stopping the German march southward, sort of. Lufthansa will still start up its Italia subsidiary to fly out of Milan, and they own Air Dolomiti as well so there will be strong competition.

But Air France now gets three out of nineteen (19?!) board seats and Alitalia will remain in Skyteam. Alitalia frequent fliers probably won’t see a big change on that front at all. So now we have a private Alitalia that’s a little smaller, but those are really the only changes so far. Can it really find its way out of last place in the race for worst airline ever? Time will tell, but of course, I highly doubt it.

I couldn’t let this year finish up without squeezing in one more post on Alitalia. It’s just too much fun. The airline has finished up the year just as it started, by being completely and totally awful in every way.

The sale of the airline is now completed and CAI will be relaunching the carrier in the next few weeks. We still have no idea which partner airline CAI will choose for Alitalia. I’m not sure what the holdup has been this time, but I’m not really going to bother trying to figure it out. They say it’ll be a “few weeks” but at the same time they say they’re close. Right.

But more importantly, the employees are unhappy (surprise, surprise) and they decided to take action at the worst possible time. You always have sympathy when people are at risk of losing their jobs, but I lose all sympathy completely when they decide to throw a wildcat strike only a couple days before Christmas, stranding travelers who just want to be with their families.

Apparently about 100 flights were scrapped on December 22 and another 40 or so on December 23 as the extremely selfish employees decided to walk off the job and take out their frustrations on innocent passengers. Shame on you all.

On the management side, Alitalia continues to try to shrink. The airline strangely decided to take ads out in a bunch of papers including the Financial Times saying that it was soliciting bids for 46 aircraft. That hardly sounds like the right way to handle this. Heck, it doesn’t sound effective at all.

But if you’re interested, they’re trying to pawn off a couple 767s, 22 MD-80s (I hear Allegiant knocking), 14 Embraer regional jets, and 8 ATR 72 turboprops. You could probably talk them into parting with one of those ERJs for a couple sheep and a bottle of wine.

Let’s raise our glasses on New Year’s Eve with the hope that Alitalia will continue to provide me with excellent blog fodder for years to come. Somehow I have no doubts.

Ok kids, who’s ready for an Alitalia update? I know, it’s been a little while. It may seem like plenty has happened, but really, we’re not that much closer to resolving this hilarious situation. One of these days, I’ll get around to making a mini-documentary that’s set to the Benny Hill theme music.

So what’s the latest? Well, CAI, the consortium of Italian businessmen, did agree to buy Alitalia for a little over €400 million plus another €600 million in debt. Sounds expensive, but it’s not when you consider that they just get to cherry pick the good parts of the airline that they want to keep. For example, they will only take 93 of Alitalia’s 173 aircraft and only about 60% of the airline’s employees will still have jobs. You know what that means. . . more strikes!

But alas, not all of the prized assets are part of the deal. It appears that Alitalia will be auctioning off its fine art collection. Yes, it had a fine art collection. Is anyone still wondering what’s wrong with this airline?

Anyway, the sale was supposed to be final earlier this week, but wouldn’t you know it’s delayed? Final approval was received yesterday from the EU, and the Italian government has now decided to require that 10% of all seats be sold at the lowest prices available this year. I can’t make this up.

They now say the deal will be signed on December 12, but CAI still needs to get its hands on Air One so it can merge them and relaunch the new Alitalia in January. Why the delay? Sounds like they might be having trouble getting all the cash together in a timely manner. I know I’d think twice before dumping that money into the pot.

We also still don’t know whether Alitalia will partner up with Lufthansa or Air France. Air France has been relatively quiet, but Lufthansa is using a rather unconventional approach to winning this bid. Lufthansa has decided to launch Lufthansa Italia with a half dozen A319s flying out of Milan. I suppose the strategy here is that if Alitalia doesn’t pick Lufthansa, then Lufthansa will just build its own airline to compete (and crush) Alitalia. We’ll see if that works out for them.

This really should have been resolved long ago, but I’m sure enjoying that it continues to drag on.

I’d take a poll on how many people are surprised to hear that Alitalia looks like it has cheated death once again, but I know the answer. Nobody is surprised, and you shouldn’t be. This airline will live on forever, and that’s good news for me. It appears they will remain the worst airline ever for the foreseeable future.

The last of the unions has finally buckled, and now the Italian investor group will be able to do its magic. Alitalia will now be merged with Air One and only the “profitable” parts will survive, or so they say. I’d expect to see the long haul routes be hurt the most in these cuts, but hopefully other parts will be slashed as well. They need it. Total expected cost to the taxpayer? Expected to be a mere 2 billion euros. Sounds like a drop in the bucket compared to the US financial bailout, but we’re talking about one small airline here.

Now the last big question is . . . will they partner with Lufthansa or Air France/KLM? Both airlines are angling at a minority stake, but it sounds like the government likes Lufthansa best, so I’m sure that’s what will happen. This would be another remarkable addition for Lufthansa on their latest buying spree. For those keeping score, they now own Swiss, they bought half of SN Brussels (with the rest to be bought later), they have rights to buy bmi, and they’re in talks with SAS and Austrian. This ignores their regional carriers. That’s a huge chunk of European aviation that would be under Lufthansa’s control.

Now that it’s clear that Alitalia won’t be going anywhere, it makes more sense for these airlines to try to grab a piece of them. This is probably the only way to get a real foothold in the country since the Italian government won’t let anyone succeed if it’s at Alitalia’s expense. So, if they want in to Italy, this is the way to go.

Lufthansa already has an agreement with Air One, and they serve a great deal of Italian traffic through their Munich hub which is only an hour away from Milan by air. So they’d clearly like to keep their involvement there. On the other hand, Air France already has Alitalia as a Skyteam partner, and now that they have a chance of survival, they’ll want to keep them around as well.

Let’s see how involved the Italians get in this process. Undoubtedly, the government will step in and make things more difficult than they should be. Stay tuned for more fun-filled antics from the worst airline ever in the coming weeks.

I’m sure I’ll get another comment saying that I’m obsessed with Alitalia, and you know what? It’s true. This is far more entertaining than any soap opera, but there is important information to be had here. Do NOT book any flights on this airline.

As predicted, the unions couldn’t quite figure out that without a reduction in force, they’ll all be jobless, so they marched forward in protest. This is actually a photo from a union rally with what I’d like to think was going through their heads at the time.

Will this really be the end? Of course not. Sure they may shut down the airline, but they’ll just resurrect it again without all that debt and without those insane union members who have sealed their fates through their stubborn behavior. They’ll probably give it a fancy new name, just like in Greece where Olympic is being shut down. But don’t worry. They’ll still have all the same underlying problems to keep us entertained.
[Original Photo: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters]