Anyone travelled with Alitalia?

netman

I'm thinking of booking some flights with Alitalia, for christmas period, as they have the cheapest flights to where I want to go.

But I've heard one horror story from a friend of mine that got me thinking, maybe there's a reason why they're so cheap...

They booked a flight that was a part of their honeymoon, from Rome to Venice and luckily they had printouts of every flight and every hotel confirmation. When they rang to double-check the flights Alitalia told them that they didn't have any booking reference for them, and then proceeded to do a spin that they were "victims of an internet fraud".

Turns out they booked two flights with Alitalia in the same session, and Alitalia had the details for the other flight, so they changed the internet fraud story... (can you believe it?)

They spent four hours trying to sort it out, faxing the printouts, ringing them multiple times, and in the end it turned out that the flight was cancelled and nobody told them about it. The Alitalia customer service didn't have the booking reference because once the flight was cancelled it disappeared off their system. Pretty freaky.

I know it's only one person, and I really do like the price for the flights, so I thought I'd tap into the well of knowledge that is boards.ie and find out if anyone else had any experience with them, be it good, bad or indifferent.

jetsonx

Apart from Olympic Airways of Greece, Alitalia are dire. They are always late
and the food served on board is atrocious.

The read the full list of horror stories on this airline go to:

http://www.airlinequality.com/Forum/alit.htm

parsi

netman wrote:

I'm thinking of booking some flights with Alitalia, for christmas period, as they have the cheapest flights to where I want to go.

But I've heard one horror story from a friend of mine that got me thinking, maybe there's a reason why they're so cheap...

They booked a flight that was a part of their honeymoon, from Rome to Venice and luckily they had printouts of every flight and every hotel confirmation. When they rang to double-check the flights Alitalia told them that they didn't have any booking reference for them, and then proceeded to do a spin that they were "victims of an internet fraud".

Turns out they booked two flights with Alitalia in the same session, and Alitalia had the details for the other flight, so they changed the internet fraud story... (can you believe it?)

They spent four hours trying to sort it out, faxing the printouts, ringing them multiple times, and in the end it turned out that the flight was cancelled and nobody told them about it. The Alitalia customer service didn't have the booking reference because once the flight was cancelled it disappeared off their system. Pretty freaky.

I know it's only one person, and I really do like the price for the flights, so I thought I'd tap into the well of knowledge that is boards.ie and find out if anyone else had any experience with them, be it good, bad or indifferent.

They must be ok - the Pope always uses them...

Ruu_Old

Alitalia are a joke of an airline, food is like dogs dinner and flights are terribly slow!

BuffyBot

Indeed, avoid Alitalia if you can.

jrey1981

From what I've seen they use rubbish old planes as well