Originally Posted by
brunos
AF is really at a loss to decide what they can do about short and medium haul.
There is indeed nothing "shuttly" about La Navette anymore. AF had announced that the mainline would only keep a couple of these destinations. If I remember correctly, even TLS was supposed to go to HOP, Transavia or whatever. That idea has gone down the dfrain thanks to the pilots.
Now they want to cal MPL a "shuttle". A nice name, but what is the current difference between a ORY-NCE and a ORY-MPL?
In the old days, flights were regular clock schedules (like departure "on the hour"). Not the case anymore. In the old days, one could easily take an earlier shuttle if you arrived at the airport early. Now it is becoming extremely difficult, even for flexible fares who have OLCIed. Of course, the US system described by San Gottardo never existed.
Apparently, they want to invent a special service specific to la Navette. You can trust someone at AF management to come up with a brilliant idea that no airline has had before. If the idea is that you can preorder cold meals (but only at ORY), the execution will fail miserably. Hopefully they will come to their sense and will do like Easyjet or Vuelling and simply have a menu onboard where you can choose from a list of cold (and hot) simple food.
What is fun is that they will have reinvented the Air Inter (IT) model with no free drink/food (except a glass of water) but an a la carte choice of drink and sandwiches.
Originally Posted by
olivedel
You are misreading between the line. They have no plan to reduce the replace the current service by an à la carte offer, but to add this offer to the current one.
Globally, their idea is to really make these a shuttle. And we all agree that their only way to do so is to make more flexible the tickets on the day of departure even for non or semi-flex original tickets, like Delta does for example for LGA-BOS or LGA-DCA flights.
Somebody knows here how the IB shuttle works between BCN and MAD ?
First of all, I agree with you both that there is nothing "shuttly" about the current la Navette offer (I am so well placed to know that this week!!
) and that in my view, it is only if they transform it to make it more that way that they can get the full advantage from their frequencies.
In terms of reduced catering or not, I wouldn't want to bet either way, regardless of the intentions expressed at this stage, you can be sure that some people will think that "tea, coffee or water" all day would be a nice cost-cutting strategy and will try to push for it
Just an observation, however, that pre-ordering cold meals will precisely make the la Navette offer even less shuttly as it will make it impossible to change flights at the last minute!
The East coast US airways feels like a real shuttle, all the more so that US airlines in general tend to be more flexible with same day changes anyway. The IB MAD-BCN Puente aereo used to be even more extreme. At one point, you would have no booking at all and would just be fitted on the next available shuttle at the time you arrived at the airport. I believe full fares had some reserved contingents and could trump anyone else till the last minute while some cheaper fares would get a waiting list instead. I think they stopped doing that but frankly, I don't think it was a bad idea. And of course, they could have flights every 10-15 minutes at peak time!!
In any case, in my view, rebranding will serve little purpose (as will cold meals) if this does no come with a complete conceptual rethinking of whether AF actually wants a shuttle service and what this would mean (alternatively, they could keep their normal structure instead which as
brunos says is effectively the case nowadays)