Originally Posted by
San Gottardo
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.
Agree with pretty much all of your post. As you say, some routes had market potential and should have been there all along, both because there is market for it and because geography makes it worth it (it may sound silly but you can fly a return between NCE and TLV and still fly the plane on another return to ATH or VCE the same day, while CDG-TLV is pretty much a return and that's it) and the others have been consciously or unconsciously chosen to be mostly what people don't really want to fly, whether leisure (e.g. MRS-North Africa) or supposedly business (e.g TLS-Germany) to avoid competition. They have done it less well than Easyjet which has typically entered many of the markets that AF has opened (e.g from Nice this is almost shocking, then went almost head to head with AF on every route except TLV and ATH). And it has indeed added to the confusion although I would argue not as much as Mini/Classic and Hop...