Can Air Malta be salvaged?

“Many sacrifices have been made: expenses have been scaled down, passengers now get a bezzun instead of the former hot meal. Other savings such as hiving off the workforce seem to have been loaded on the possible future agreement with Alitalia/ Etihad. ”

Days succeed days, weeks succeed weeks, months too, but we are no nearer a solution for Air Malta, it would seem.

Timeframes and deadlines pass, agreements have been reached with most of the workers but there is still no agreement with Alitalia-Etihad the preferred bidders.

Speculation mounts about what will the new partner expect out of the agreement.

Calls have been renewed for the government to change the direction drastically, instead of getting a foreign partner to sell Air Malta shares to the Maltese.

People who make such suggestions, including the Leader of the Opposition, must not know how the Stock Exchange works, what rules an IPO. Such people may not know the company which wants to sell shares on the stock exchange must be in the black for a number of years, whereas Air Malta is notoriously still in the red.

As we all know, the company has been in intensive care for a number of years and while the huge deficit of past years has been reduced, the company is still making losses.

Many sacrifices have been made: expenses have been scaled down, passengers now get a bezzun instead of the former hot meal. Other savings such as hiving off the workforce seem to have been loaded on the possible future agreement with Alitalia/Etihad.

Still, other areas of the company’s operations have not been touched or reformed. For instance ticketing: one cannot understand how at each and every occasion that one compare Air Malta’s prices with those of other airlines, not just low cost ones but also scheduled ones, Air Malta’s prices are sky high.

The company keeps coming up with experimental market- ing ploys such as flying a plane that provides bodycare to its passengers, or turning the plane into a mobile disco on its way to Ibiza, all one-offs, but then its Frequent Flyer programme is a shambles, and has long been so. And somehow, any time the airline comes up with an offer, this seems to disappear in no time.

Had the airline been any other company, potential investors would not look at it, or would expect deep surgery which the government, nay the governments have been loath to make. For the truth of the matter is the airline’s ills are mainly governments-driven.

We do not know what will happen in the coming days, weeks, months. But we do know that other countries kept going even after their national airlines collapsed. Hungary, for instance, lost its Malev from one day to the next but its tourism is still strong. Ditto Cyprus which lost Cyprus Airways although that happened in the midst of a national disaster.

Malta’s tourism may have to survive even after Air Malta has not.