After 3 years sold the Millemiglia program, the new owner is Trenitalia (thus the state)
According to reports from various press organs after several unsuccessful auctions Italia Loyalty managed to sell what [...]
Alitalia
According to reports from various media outlets after several failed auctions Italia Loyalty reportedly succeeded in selling what was left of the old Alitalia loyalty program, to buy would be Trenitalia, the State Railways subsidiary.
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No figures are currently known (the first auction asked for 50m euros) and there is no mention on the site of the bankruptcy of the old flag carrier, There is also no reference to a fourth auction, so it is likely that the agreement is the result of a Direct negotiation between the two companies.
What's left of the old Millemiglia
In the 3 years since Alitalia had stopped flying and ITA Airways had launched its new FF, I continued to follow the vicissitudes of MyMiglia, as the program had been renamed, and I had been surprised at how active it continued to be and proactive although lacking an airline of choice.
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There has always been talk of 6.2 million members, but In real life the active users were less than 1/5, today 3 years later I have no idea how many users can still be engaged, bearing in mind that foreign members are unlikely to be intercssed with a loyalty program linked to a railway company.
What we have seen in these 30 months of agony is that the extraordinary administration that managed Alitalia's "left over" Played all his cards to save the value of the program.
If between 2020 and 2021, that is, at the height of the pandemic, it had produced over 10M in profit, 2022, the first year without the airline anymore, the company My Miles spa (100% subsidiary of Alitalia spa) closed with 6M losses against 16M in sales.
What Trenitalia will be able to do with the Millemiglia program.
I doubt there are any great synergies possible between the Cartafreccia Program and Millemiglia (or My Mile) at the user level.
First, as mentioned above, if there were already few active users in October 2021, let alone how many will be left today, but further reducing the numbers will be privacy rules.
GDPR will force buyers to have to seek consent from the individual enrollee and in these cases silence is not the same as assent, and the risk is that Paper Arrow will find itself with a few tens of thousands of new members.
In addition to this it is possible that there are many "duplicates" given the boom in recent years in High Speed Rail, it is likely that many Millemiglia users were already accumulating Cartafreccia points.
Definitely Millemiglia know-how could help Trenitalia's loyalty program grow, partner relationships, which to date are still many and active, but I don't see much activity other than converting, in some way, points and status of surviving members into the Trenitalia program.
Millemiglia sale to Trenitalia: the state sells and buys
The initial request for the 50M was really crazy, if we think that the Alitalia brand and trademark had been sold for 90M euros, but it had logic in 2021 and was potentially attractive to an airline interested in those figures.
This is no longer the case today and with several campaigns of status match launched ad hoc by ITA Airways, Lufthansa, Emirates and many others the hot users have already settled elsewhere.
The final figures of the deal are not known, but they will be in the near future for sure, however, a question arises for me. Does the taxpayer pay in the end? The goal of the Extraordinary Administration was (and is) to recover as much money as possible from what was left over from the old Alitalia and return sums to the Italian State Accounting Office, but in this case having bought Trenitalia, which is 100% controlled by Ferrovie dello Stato, which is wholly owned by the State money goes out of one hand and into the other, and in the end the state doesn't recover anything? or does it?