Originally Posted by
San Gottardo
Ground, part 2, dealing with irrops. Didn't have any, which is good, so I cannot assess this on any datapoints. But my intuition tells me not to trust the French with dealing with unplanned situations and to prefer being in the hands of the Brits, Germans or Swiss. I still have traumatic memories of dealing with lost luggage, snow episodes, strikes, etc and how that was handled (or wasn't). Put it like this, if there was an ash cloud tomorrow, I'd immediately cancel all my AF reservations and would deal only with LH/LX to get me through the chaos.
Ground, part 3, the lounges. Not improved. I still find their lounges very poor. There are of course differences between the different lounges, but the overall concept of not providing more than different variations of snacks, the sometimes run-down state of them, the badly-designed showers at CDG 2E, frankly I don't look forward to my time in an AF lounge. I find British Airways and Lufthansa lounges better, despite the shortcomings that these have. The Premiere lounge at CDG is of course a major exception. It is a great success in terms of design, "functioning", catering. I have debates with myself whether I prefer it to the First Class Terminal in FRA (and the other FCLs in FRA and MUC) and I end up with both the Air France and Lufthansa First lounges making me equally happy, albeit for different reasons. The Air France lounge is more beautiful and stylish, the Lufthansa one has a couple of highly appreciated features the AF one does not have. In the end, if I had to chose my airline based on the lounge experience I prefer other airlines (with the notable exeption of the Première salon at CDG).
Indeed, a very balanced account on AF's pros and cons. I am personally more severe on some aspects (e.g. long haul Premium Voyageur or boarding because depending on terminal, Skypriority works really well or not at all). On a footnote, though, I would say that on irrops, I wonder if your assessment of LX/LH might be clouded by your HON status with them. I have travelled with LH and LX (mostly LX) a lot more than usual in the past 4 months and have had the most horrible experience with them in the case of the many irrops (5) which I have faced (all on connecting flights). Every time, it was obvious from point of origin) that I would miss my connection in ZRH. Every single time, they refused rerouting from point of origin (despite some LH or OS connections being available on several occasions), every time they refused to reroute me on other airlines from ZRH letting me take the whole of a 4h plus delay at arrival. They have also not answered either of the two complaints which I have sent to them through their online system. I should add - even though it shouldn't be relevant - that I am *A gold.
Some of the people I dealt with were nice and tried (called supervisors who then refused) others were outright unpleasant. On top of it, my other gripe with LX is that on several occasions, at boarding gate before boarding one of their Avros, they tried (sometimes they managed sometimes my protesting worked) to tag my hand luggage which totally fitted LX's size and weight limits (pretty obviously so too as they have the 'test shapes' at the gate). I have had gate-checking of luggage with other airlines (including AF) on regional aircrafts but that was for luggage to be received at the foot of the aircraft while invariably LX out of ZRH would try and make it 'proper' checked luggage (which annoyed me no end as I usually take a small suitcase with everything including laptop in).
Anyway, all that to say that while I agree with your general perception of AF (Ok but great), I think that for the 'average flyer' your assessment of the competition might be a bit optimistic on some aspects. While I find the AF lounges rather average (much less good than BA for instance), I also personally find them much better than LH and LX Senator ones (massages, better showers, less bad internet system, etc).