Air Malta thanks Ryanair for marketing tips

Air Malta has "thanked" Ryanair's sales and marketing manager for giving the national airline the theme for its next advertising campaign.

In a conspicuous U-turn on strategy - which has traditionally been low key - Air Malta went on the offensive in the past week and started exchanging broadsides with Europe's largest budget airline.

"The last thing that we expected was to see Ryanair playing catch-up with Air Malta and launch a free sale offer a few days after we launched our Lm3 seat sale," a spokesman for the national airline told The Sunday Times.

On Tuesday, both Air Malta and Ryanair announced cheap offers and at the same time took the opportunity to criticise each other's strategies.

Ryanair is offering 25,000 seats for free on Maltese routes, excluding taxes and charges, while Air Malta announced that its clients could travel to one of three destinations for only Lm3 (excluding taxes and fuel surcharge) one way.

The Air Malta spokesman admitted yesterday that the airline had embarked on an aggressive marketing strategy, which reflects the local and overseas marketing behaviour.

While refusing to say how Air Malta has taken the cue from Ryanair for its next campaign, the spokesman said: "We need to reply to the attacks, we need to rebut the statements that we have 'ludicrously' high fares, when this is not the case."

Air Malta said it does not levy any ludicrous hidden charges to its passengers when booking online. Each Ryanair passenger has to pay €12 for the 15 kg allowance of checked baggage and any excess baggage is charged at €8 per kilo, plus a credit card fee. Air Malta said it prides itself on offering a full service treatment, a brand new aircraft fleet together with in-flight entertainment.

Asked whether it was ultimately the give-away prices offered by airlines like Ryanair that forced Air Malta to slash its prices, the spokesman said the Internet had radically changed the distribution mode, and that was why Air Malta could afford to come up with unprecedented cheap offers.

"The feedback to the Early Bird, Lm3 and Lm9 offers has been fantastic, to the extent that we sold next winter aggressively before summer kicked in."

And the good news for the consumer is that Air Malta plans to issue new offers every month.