Summary
- ITA Airways partners with GO7 to supply passengers the flexibility to book connecting train tickets on Deutsche Bahn’s network after landing at Frankfurt Airport.
- Lufthansa also offers the same service called ‘Rail&Fly,’ with over 5,600 train stations covered on the rail service provider’s network.
- Lufthansa’s acquisition of a stake in ITA Airways will help the German airline group proceed its growth within the necessary Italian market. The closure of the deal remains to be pending.
ITA Airways now offers its passengers the flexibility to book connecting train tickets on Deutsche Bahn’s (DB) network after they land at Frankfurt Airport (FRA). The Italian airline partnered with GO7, a software development company, using the latter’s W2 product.
In response to ITA Airways, passengers flying from either Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino Airport (FCO) or Milan Linate Airport (LIN) to FRA will give you the option to proceed their journeys on DB’s network inside Germany and Switzerland with a single ticket. As such, combining a single flight and train ticket will add 13 recent destinations to the carrier’s network.
The list of latest destinations includes but shouldn’t be exclusive to German cities, equivalent to Cologne, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, Dresden, Munich, Leipzig, and Berlin. The one recent destination in Switzerland will likely be Basel.
ITA Airways also offers this service, which it calls ‘Plane + Train’, at other European airports. Along with its home base of FCO and the newly added FRA, the service is on the market at Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport (MAD), Barcelona El Prat International Airport (BCN), Zurich Airport (ZRH), Geneva Airport (ZRH), London City (LCY) and Heathrow Airport (LHR), Amsterdam Schiphol Airport (AMS), and Brussels Airport (BRU).
Closer alignment to Lufthansa?
Much like ITA Airways, Lufthansa also allows its passengers to book a single flight and train ticket on its service called ‘Nevertheless, while the ITA Airways train network from FRA only includes 13 destinations, Lufthansa’s partnership with DB ends in over 5,600 train stations being covered on the rail service provider’s network.
Photo: Lukas Wunderlich | Shutterstock
In response to Lufthansa, when using Rail&Fly, travelers can board the train on the identical day or a day before and/or after their flights. Passengers can choose from three train types, including the InterCity (IC), EuroCity (EC), and InterCity Express (ICE) trains.
Lufthansa announced its acquisition of a 41% stake in ITA Airways in May 2023. While the agreement includes an choice to purchase the remaining shares of the Italian airline, the acquisition will still should be cleared by regulatory authorities, including the European Commission (EC).
A crucial market
When the German airline group, which also owns several other de facto flag carriers, equivalent to Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, and Swiss International Air Lines (trading as SWISS), announced the acquisition of a stake in ITA Airways, Carsten Sphor, its Chief Executive Officer (CEO), remarked concerning the importance of the Italian market. He said,
The announcement also detailed that As such, the group signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Italian rail service provider Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane in February 2023.
Photo: Alessia Pierdomenico | Shutterstock
Lufthansa warned that the closure of the deal Up to now, the European Commission’s (EC) merger case filings don’t include the topic acquisition. In September 2023, Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, told reporters that she was baffled as to why the EC has not cleared the acquisition yet, as reported by Reuters. Nevertheless, the identical report added that on the time, the Commission had not yet received a proper notification concerning the transaction.