Last week, I talked about what you should do if you were an Alitalia frequent flyer and had plenty of miles in the bank. Since then, the airline has put up a For Sale sign, running adverts in the Italian papers that effectively say ‘Everything must go’ and giving a deadline of 30 September for interested parties to make a bid.

However, this act of desperation may have finally broken the deadlock between the airline’s nine unions and CAI, the Italian consortium that walked away from a deal to buy the airline. CAI’s plan was to liquidate certain loss-making departments of the carrier and merger the remaining parts of the airline with rival AirOne. Several unions rejected the deal but have now come back to the table so all may not be lost. Those frequent flyer points may yet come in handy.

In the meantime, I thought I would ask the UK’s business travel agencies what they were doing about bookings on Alitalia.

Stewart Harvey, director of client management at HRG: “While we hope Alitalia will continue to operate, our priority is to help our clients and provide alternative options should that be necessary.”

Meanwhile, Norman Gage of Advantage, the network of independent business travel agencies, said: “I only think that members have been booking Alitalia out of necessity and not through choice.”

Other business travel agencies say they have been protecting bookings on Alitalia by booking alternative flights on other airlines as back-up, which are cancelled if Alitalia does keep flying. This is made possible by using flexible tickets, which can be cancelled without penalty at the last minute.

Things hang in the balance. This weekend, for example, the airline has cancelled a number of flights between Heathrow and both Milan Linate and Rome.

It would be a brave business traveller who had a discounted Alitalia ticket for the coming weeks and did not have an alternative plan. Interestingly, one of the year’s biggest business travel events, the global conference of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, which attracts many of the most important people in the industry takes place in Rome in a couple of weeks. Alitalia’s timing could not have been more perfect.