Originally Posted by
San Gottardo
It is generally true that when terminating a product you upset the customers that have been using it and you risk that those customers boycott your other products. However, in the specific case of Air France's BdP routes I think that is not a problem.
The BdP routes were established to attract a customer segment in which AF previously was not attractive: customers that are looking for low fares on P2P routes from their departure airport outside of Paris. Most of these people did not fly AF before but were more of the Easyjet clientele. Now AF realises that it cannot make money with customers that want low fares on P2P routes and quits that market. So it basically leaves behind a customer base which it cannot make money with. That is a good decision.
To be honest, this was the claimed goal of MiNi but not of the Bases de Province. When AF opened the Bases de Province, they made it very clear that they realised that AF used to be the airline of choice in France 10 or 20 years ago and that progressively, as they essentially shrunk from most regional markets except on domestic routes, many customers ended up looking elsewhere. For example, if you take NCE-TLV, the target cannot be U2 because U2 does not fly NCE-TLV, but it is more all the people who had deserted to fly the route on LX, AZ, BA, TK and more. On other routes, AF is only competing against other legacy carriers and when Easyjet came in, it was only as a reaction to AF's announcements. So I think that the customer objective of the Bases was essentially to recapture a clientele which used to automatically think AF for all of its travelling (direct and connecting) but has progressively deserted it so that AF has come to account for smaller and smaller % of the traffic at such airports as NCE and TLS. It would be very wrong to think that this is only leisure traffic - indeed many high tech, medical research, and computer companies have their main French and/or European operations in the Nice area, Toulouse remains the largest centre in the aviation industry and Marseille also has lots of companies around, so they are the people who would think that if AF is really Air Paris, they might as well fly with those other legacy carriers which seem to be able to make money on routes which, in many cases, AF cannot manage to transform into winning operations for a variety of good and bad reasons. So it is not as though from NCE, MRS, or TLS, everyone was flying U2, it is also a case that in those regions, many people happily boast their LH HON or BA G cards and AF thought that by becoming a 'local' player they would recapture some of them.
PS: Monaco has the highest flights/habitant ratio in the world, and the area between St Tropez and Menton apparently the highest flights/habitant ratio in France.
