Alitalia sees recovery continuing in H2

Italian carrier Alitalia expects passenger traffic to continue recovering in the second half of the year after a 10 per cent rise in first-half revenue, thanks to growing travel demand especially in and out of Brazil and Argentina, a senior executive said.

Alitalia, in which Air France-KLM holds a 25 per cent stake, may also increase its flight frequency to Osaka, the business hub of western Japan, eyeing greater access in the country as once-high-flying Japan Airlines slashes routes as part of its massive restructuring.

"When there's a market opportunity, go after it. You can't wait, you have to react very fast because the market changes very quickly," Giorgio Callegari, executive vice president for alliances and strategies at Alitalia, told Reuters in an interview.

"When JAL announced reduction of their services we decided we would revisit our network strategy and readjust our long-houl network to see if we could come up with more capacity to dedicate to Japan. We have been successful in doing that," he said.

JAL, after filing for bankruptcy in January with $25 billion in debt, is set to terminate both its Milan and Rome services by early next month. The Japanese carrier also plans to abandon one in eight overseas flights and end a quarter of its home routes in a bid to return to profit.

Tapping into a market opportunity created by JAL's withdrawal, the loss-making Italian carrier is set to increase its service to Tokyo's Narita airport to 14 flights a week by early next month, up 40 percent from six months ago.