Originally Posted by
blairvanhorn
You piqued my curiosity. I found this in a
US Congressional Research Service report on-line (they are citing a 1994 article in the Washington Post):
Filling the seats on Concorde flights with paying customers was not easy. Concorde tickets were generally priced at about twice the regular first-class airfare on a comparable subsonic flight. For example, in 2003, a round trip across the Atlantic on the Concorde cost £8,000, equivalent to about $15,475 in 2017 U.S. dollars, almost twice the first-class ticket price on a Boeing 747.11 Once the attraction of novelty wore off, the airlines found it difficult to fill the seats, often flying at less than half capacity.12
From 1976, AF and BA tried many different routes plus charter flights. Most were commercially unsuccessful and by the nineties they only flew to NYC.
I believe that those flights had a decent load of high-paying customers. That did not mean that AF made profit as the plane was expensive to operate and required a backup plane ready in case of mechanical problems.