Dedicated to St. Ambroise, patron saint of the city of Milan, the fourth Boeing B737-400 aircraft
Albastar presents the fourth Boeing B737-400 aircraft (EC-MFS) in its fleet, dedicating it to the city of Milan, in honour of one of the most important identifying symbols of the Milanese capital, St. Ambrose.
At the ceremony that took place this morning at Milan’s Malpensa Airport, the Episcopal Vicar of Milan, Monsignor Erminio De Scalzi blessed the aircraft that will fly mainly on routes to the city of Lourdes, which from May 2016 will be connected with two scheduled flights per week from Milan’s Malpensa Airport. Also present at the ceremony were Albastar’s main partners, Unitalsi, Brevivet and Rusconi Viaggi; Albastar, the airline that specialises in religious tourism and pilgrimages in particular, has flights scheduled from all over Italy in association with these partners.
Michael Harrington, Albastar’s Managing Director said, “We have decided to dedicate one of our aircraft to the city of Milan as we would like to consolidate our projects for development at Milan Malpensa, an airport from which we have been flying for over five years and which has been our operational base in Italy since 2013. Together with our partners, we are going to start a new direct route to Lourdes, a destination to which we are the market leader in Europe, thanks to the number of flights we operate and the number of passengers we carry there. We are also working in association with SEA, to open up new routes and for the development of ad hoc services for passengers, in the hope that these will make a major contribution to the future of air traffic at the airport and that this will represent an opportunity for growth, as a result of the increase in business that shall be brought about by the company’s activity.”
Albastar, a privately owned Spanish airline, has its head office in Palma de Mallorca and its main operational base in Milan Malpensa; it came into being in spring 2010 thanks to the initiative of a group of Italian businessmen in the tourism and transport industries, with the aim of providing a la carte air transport services with departures from the main Italian and European airports to the most popular holiday destinations in the Mediterranean, Northern Africa and the Red Sea, in association with with the leading Italian, Spanish and European tour operators.
Six years since it started operations, Albastar offers the market a functional business model, which at the same time is flexible and varied, capable of providing different products: domestic and international flights, depending on market demand, whether these be for the leisure or the religious markets, operated with a fleet of four Boeing 737-400s, each with 170 seats in one single class. Albastar started to operate scheduled routes to Lourdes from Rome and Bergamo in May 2015, and, from May 2016 on, shall be adding twice weekly flights to Lourdes from Milan Malpensa, on Mondays and Thursdays.
