Originally Posted by
irishguy28
Ignoring those airlines that stopped operating in the Europe-US market in the past year (US Airways - for obvious reasons, Jet Airways and Kuwait Airways), only 4 airlines out of a total of 39 airlines had fewer seats in this week in September 2016 as compared to the same week last year.
Air France was one of those four, with 1.84% fewer seats. Their TATL JV partners all posted increases: Delta +6.87% (undoubtedly boosted by a drop in partner Virgin Atlantic's seat numbers), Alitalia +7.38%, KLM +0.49%.
Air France's share of the market slipped from 5.54% to 5.02%. [Delta's increase in seat numbers wasn't enough to prevent them from declining in terms of overall market share - they slipped from 14.49% to 14.29%, but remain the single biggest operator on US-Europe. Overall, there are more seats between the US and Europe this year than last]
I think you will be waiting a long, long time before you see Air France fetching up at Denver.
To be honest I think that change within 1 year is too short term to tell us much, and decline in seat numbers is in part a mathematical consequence of the introduction of BEST on more routes with the related capacity decline, and in part a sad consequence of US visits to France being hit by the recent tragic terror attacks, with numbers that will hopefully recover soon.
That said, I don't think the US is a main development priority for AF (which has had an explicit strategy to take a leading position in China, Latin America, and Africa) unlike BA which focuses most of its energy on the US. It doesn't mean AF won't open new US routes but personally I wouldn't expect DEN to be in pole position if it did if only because of the lack of onwards DL connections.