ITA Airways Volare Program: Issues With Membership Not Being Recognized By SkyTeam Airlines

When Altialita went under and the new carrier ITA Airways emerged they also established a new frequent flyer program called Volare but several months after both the airline and the program are still unknown to other SkyTeam partners such as Delta Air Lines.

Volare even offered a rather generous status match to a whole range of other programs but as the matched members are now trying to apply their benefits at certain SkyTeam partners they are met with blank stares.

ITA is basically the Phoenix rising from the ashes of Alitalia as the airline finally disappeared after decades of burning hundreds of millions in both taxpayer and investor money.

Their website (including the section of the Volare program) is one of the weirdest I’ve ever seen.

It has absolutely no logical or intuitive functions that would help customers find information relevant to both the airline and the frequent flyer program. It barely does lead you to a way to sign up for the program, described as “Subscribe”.

Nevertheless, ITA is now officially a SkyTeam partner but airlines such as Delta didn’t get the memo.

They still list Alitalia under frequent flyer programs when buying a ticket or checking in:

The number doesn’t work when entered under Alitalia and ITA is not on the list:

Delta Air Lines agents both at reservations or at the airport also don’t have an option of adding the ITA number to the reservation, leading to the program being basically obsolete for Delta travel.

Several members have already taken to social media and also contacted LoyaltyLobby for advice but all there is to say for the time being is that until Delta is making adjustments to its system in order to recognize the carrier code and number there’s nothing that can be done.

One could try and play around with entering the number as Alitalia and then add a few digits (0’s) but I don’t think this is going to work.

According to one reader, Aeroflot likewise doesn’t accept the ITA membership number. I’m sure there are many more carriers who have this issue and I wonder why. The IATA Code AZ remained the same.

Back in the day, there was a similar issue with Alitalia numbers and Korean Air. It took quite a while until someone figured out that you had to enter 3 zeros before the number in order to be accepted.

Conclusion

ITA Airways Volare program has been live for several months but from what it looks like right now there is still an acceptance issue with some carriers who haven’t heard of the new carrier despite having been admitted to SkyTeam.

I’m not sure how this could happen. Isn’t there a liaison between airlines and SkyTeam that would immediately work on adjusting the system to be prepared? The aviation world is really mind-boggling sometimes.