Skift Travel News Blog

Low-cost carrier Wizz Air has launched a flight subscription program, opting for the same platform that Alaska Airlines uses.

The European airline has partnered with Caravelo, a company that builds subscription platforms for airlines. They claim the program, called MultiPass, is a first for Europe.

It will initially be available for six months for the Italian and Polish markets. Passengers will be able to fly domestic Italy and international Poland routes, booking up until five days before departure.

For a fixed monthly fee, the subscribers can choose between one way or round-trip flights, and can also customize their plan with ancillaries.

Caravelo partnered with Alaska Airlines for its Flight Pass in February last year, while Frontier Airlines also recently launched its own, called GoWild!

Barcelona-based Caravelo also raised $3 million in funding in July last year. “In the past year, the industry has finally woken up to the power of subscriptions,” CEO Inaki Uriz said at the time.

For more on subscription models in travel, read Skift’s Megatrends from 2021.

The Lufthansa Group has made an offer to buy a 40 percent stake in Italy’s state-owned ITA Airways, it said Wednesday. The bid comes after a multi-year process, or “beauty contest” as it has been called, to find a strategic partner for ITA, and a dramatic change of fortune for Lufthansa after being counted out last August.

Financial terms of the offer were not made public but Lufthansa said Wednesday that its initial offer for a minority stake includes taking full control of ITA in the future. Italian daily Corriere della Sera has previously estimated the value of the offer to be between $250-260 million (€230-240 million). The German airline group and Italy’s Ministry of Economy and Finance must next agree to a memorandum of understanding, which would allow exclusive negotiations over the final terms of the deal to begin.

“For Lufthansa Group, Italy is the most important market outside of its home markets and the U.S.,” the airline said in a statement. “Italy’s importance for both business and private travel lies in its strong export-oriented economy and status as one of Europe’s top vacation spots.”

Lufthansa Group CEO Carsten Spohr has previously called the group the “natural home” for ITA.

The bid is a change of fortune for Lufthansa. In August, the previous Italian government selected a bid by private equity firm Certares and including commercial agreements with Air France-KLM and Delta Air Lines for ITA. However, the new government of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni failed to reach a deal with the Certares-led group before the exclusivity period expired on October 31. Air France-KLM has since shifted its takeover interest to TAP Air Portugal.

ITA replaced Alitalia as Italy’s national carrier in October 2021.

The value of the euro is plummeting and that means Americans vacationing in Europe will see their dollars going further, CNN reported.

The euro’s falling means the dollar and euro are almost at parity, and “the UK pound is also weak: It’s exchanging at $1.20,” the report said.

That means more expensive vacations for Europeans and British.

Even if the dollar is strong, though, compared with the euro and pound, hotel prices across Europe in May were soaring in some countries compared to May 2019 before the pandemic.

Average daily rates in May 2022 were up in Italy (23 percent), Ireland (21 percent), and Spain (17 percent) compared with the same period in 2019, according to STR Global.