ITA Airways staff stage 24-hour walk-out, grounding hundreds of flights across Italy

Air travel in and out of Italy ground to a virtual standstill on 16 April after flight attendants, pilots and ground-handling crews employed by ITA Airways mounted a 24-hour national strike. According to union representatives quoted by Russian business news agency AK&M, more than 70 per cent of the carrier’s scheduled services were cancelled, forcing the airline to scrap or combine most domestic rotations and to axe long-haul departures to New York, Buenos Aires and Tokyo.



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Milan Linate, Rome Fiumicino, Naples and Venice registered the highest number of cancellations, but smaller regional airports such as Bari and Catania also saw significant disruption. The walk-out, called by a coalition of transport unions after weeks of failed pay talks, is the latest flash-point in a bitter dispute over the carrier’s new three-year labour contract. Unions say that a proposed productivity clause would lengthen working days without appropriate overtime compensation and would weaken existing rostering safeguards designed to reduce fatigue. ITA Airways—created from the remnants of Alitalia in 2021 and now 41 per cent owned by Lufthansa—insists the measures are needed to stem continuing operating losses and to restore competitiveness ahead of the 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics. For business travellers the immediate impact was severe. Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport asked passengers to arrive at least four hours before departure because re-routing and refund queues “filled the entire departure hall”. Several Milan-based multinationals told the daily Il Sole 24 Ore they were switching executives onto high-speed rail for same-day meetings in Rome and Turin, while others rerouted via Zurich or Vienna to reach long-haul connections. Freight forwarders also reported knock-on delays as belly-hold cargo missed onward flights. Under Italy’s statutory strike-protection rules, a skeleton timetable operated during the legally protected time-windows of 07:00-10:00 and 18:00-21:00, but capacity was insufficient to clear backlogs. ITA Airways estimates that more than 32,000 passengers will need to be re-accommodated over the next three days. Travellers with fixed appointments are being offered free rebooking or refunds; corporate clients with ITA BusinessConnect contracts can shift bookings onto SkyTeam partners without penalty, but inventory in the crucial Milan-Rome corridor is already scarce. The government’s transport guarantor has so far resisted calls for compulsory arbitration, but warned both sides that further stoppages so close to the Summer peak season could trigger intervention under Italy’s “Olympics safeguard” decree, which allows Rome to requisition minimum service levels in sectors deemed vital to the 2026 Games. Companies with high volumes of intra-Italian travel are therefore advising staff to build additional buffer days into itineraries through the end of May.