Originally Posted by
orbitmic
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.
Hmm. Interesting. The company made that "we want to re-become the airline of choice" in other contexts as well. It is used as one of the reasons to invest in the new premium cabins. So if re-becoming the company of choice is the goal, and if it is recognized that to be the company of choice means to have a decent product, why then did they offer what was basically an LCC experience?
Also, I have my doubts about some of the routes chosen. If you want to be the airline of choice for people in France why then didn't they open up routes to where these people want to travel? Fair enough, some routes may have their own "right to exist" and could/should have been offered even before the BdP days (TLV for instance?). But how do you become the airline of choice by flying 4 times a week between Marseille and Prague or twice a week from Nice to Naples? If it was all those business travelers that you mention, why not go to places where these people actually want to go to and offer them a schedule that suits them (morning out, evening back)? Moreover, didn't the Monde article quote someone as saying that they had under-estimated the seasonality of the demand, which to me means that most of the traffic on those routes was after all low yielding tourism?
Frankly I do not know of any legacy carrier in Europe that can profitably serve non-hub routes with mainline planes. Lufthansa did so for a very long time but now phases this out to Germanwings - and if even the large German cities with their big economies (Dusseldorf, Hamburg, etc) cannot support it, how should this ever work from Bordeaux, Bilbao, Bologna, Birmingham or Bergen? These "secondary" (some of them are not so secondary) airports are best served by the likes of Easyjet, Norwegian, Vueling and FlyBe. They all seem to be LCCs without being downright appalling and thus fair enough for the business crowd. But these market seem not work if served by the full fledged legacy model with mainline planes (although I must admit that I am surprised that LH cannot get HAM, DUS, and to a lesser extent STR and BER to work. There is demand there).
And if we conclude that legacy airliners cannot do it then we are left with two conclusions about Air France: they either thought they knew better than the market and still went ahead. Or they did the same analysis with the same conclusion and therefore launched the BdP as an LCC-like offering. I believe it's the latter, i.e. it actually is an LCC approach to counter market share gains from U2 and the likes, even though U2 wasn't present in many of those markets at the time AF launched its BdP.