San Gottardo

Quick benchmark, CDG-ZRH, in J, Air France vs. Swiss:

Swiss

• Welcome bottle of water and refreshing towel
• Full breakfast tray, with hot breakfast (quiche) on the early morning flight, at other times full breakfast or snack
• Full bar, champagne, all hot drinks
• Chocolate before landing
• All served on china, metal cutlery
• Real glasses
• Basically almost the same as pre-Covid, except for people no longer helping themselves from the bread basket
• Upon arrival in Zurich, when not parked at the jetty: dedicated bus for J class passengers (at CDG planes always use the jetty)

Air France

• Two pre-packaged bars, one chocolate, one savoury I think
• Hot drinks limited to coffee, tea (but no choice of tea, no lemon), chocolate which is hot water poured over some powder residue on the bottom. "Juice" is nectar, champagne and wine are available
• On one flight: oshibori
• Upon arrival: same bus for all the pax

I know that airines reduce their service for health protection reasons. So be aware of drinking tea with lemon, real juice instead of nectar, hot food or basically anything other than a cereal bar, of eating from china or drinking from real glasses, of using metal cutlery - you put your health at risk. At least that is what AF tells us.

Bullspread

Very sad for the LX J PAX who are at the door of the death by enjoying a full J service 😂

San Gottardo

And to add one thing (just thinking of it as I just came off the AF flight):

• Swiss Business Class: neighbouring seat is free in 100% of cases
• Air France Business Class (this is on the E90, so I suppose that is their excuse): all seats can be occupied, and very often are

But don't worry. The lack of distance to someone else is made up by the use of papercups. And they make reassuring statements such as "for health reasons (!!) please keep the seat that you have been assigned, do not change seats". I am relieved. Sitting in 2B instead of 2A will save my life. So I tell the chap in 2A with a leg injury and who would like the aisle seat that he cannot change with me in 2B, that would be bad for health reasons. So he tries to squeeze his leg and crutches underneath 2A, that is better for health.

And of course no food in 2B with an (injuredI) neighbour next to me is much safer than having hot breakfast in 2A and nobody next to me. To be fair, there may be a logic here: since we stuff people in even in J, let's make sure they don't eat as that would be dangerous at such proximity.

maalloc

Ohh don't badmouth AF! They have their down-to-earth logic.
They are walking on very thin ice business-wise with the reduced air traffic.
So they want to bring in highest-paying customers. Makes sense, right? Hence the need to attract travelers to J instead of Y.
Hence the papercups... Oh wait... Nope, this one doesn't work either. I give up.

Goldorak

Thanks for this funny evening reading San Gottardo . Please take the time to send your report to AF. I do it on my side, hoping that they will finally realize they need to stop to tell us covid BS...

Goldorak

This is not AF but XK, but I believe it is relevant to post it here as the Corsica routes are all code-shared with AF.
There is still 0 service on XK flights and during an announcement at the beginning of the flight, they say that the service is suspended due to applicable regulations .
I always found XK FA unpleasant and rudes, but now they can qualify for the best liars.

gkl

Excellent service on the A319 OTP-CDG. Warm meal with a choice of Beef or Vegetarian (tasty vegetable risotto). The only downside is that they still don't serve fresh bread. I still don't get it how the virus can spread over freshly baked bread served with bread tongs.


Afterwards we were treated with chocolate or nuts. in my case "and":

San Gottardo

That - I.e. your after meal treat - is the full service on short flights. Except that glasses are replaced by paper cups. For health reasons of course,, because drinking from a glass between Bucharest and Paris is not dangerous, whilst drinking from a glass between Milan and Paris threatens your life.

fransknorge

How much of what you describe here is not the fact of the airlines but of the special regulations put in place by their countries governments/regulatory agencies ?

San Gottardo

Nothing.

Unless you point me to the special regulation by the French government that prohibits giving glasses to passengers traveling to Athens but not to passengers traveling to Barcelona.

Bullspread

... or that a monopolistic route CDG/AMS is more dangerous than a CDG/FRA 😂

fly747first

Not bad for short-haul J

Romanianflyer

Did some Air France J flying last week. Meals were quite good (except for one), service was good to top notch.

OTP-CDG

Early morning 6am flight. I can imagine this route might not be a crew favourite due to the early wake-up call, but for the second time in a row on this particular flight the crew was all smiles and absolutely lovely. Food was pretty poor - but that's usually the case with OTP catered breakfasts. Luckily there was some champagne and OJ to wash it away. I appreciated that I could get a coffee while already on descent having just flown over Reims!



CDG-OPO

USB charging ports on the A321 did not work. However, the crew on this flight was excellent again. Pretty good meal.



OPO-CDG

This time USB charging ports were working on the A321 but the WiFi internet not. Again a good meal, especially the appetiser/side. Flight was delayed by 1.5 hours due to late outbound flight out of CDG (smth with a broken tyre). Minutes before take-off I received a message from AF that I would miss by connecting flight back to Bucharest, with a selection of rebooking options for the next day.



CDG-OTP

Upon reporting at AF ground services at CDG 2F I was told that if I would make a run to Terminal 2E, I could perhaps still catch my OTP flight as they were still boarding - which was what I did. As there were no queues at passport control I ended up just making it, with the doors immediately closing after I boarded as the last person..

Crew was excellent again, even offering an open bar PDB (on the other 3 flights, only bottled water was given as PDB). A glass of champagne is very much welcome after running through CDG! Moreover, I was the only person in J on this flight - which made for another nice flight. The meal - succulent beef - was excellent. I might also had some cognac, coffee and chocolate shortbread before landing well after midnight at OTP.

On a final note, not a fan of this particular on-board red - while the red in the lounge tasted surprisingly nice.





Of course, my checked bag did not make it to OTP due to the delay and extremely short connection at CDG. In hindsight I should perhaps never have ran to 2E given it would be 400 EUR in EC/261 compensation and hotel/rebooking on costs of AF. But well, being a well-mannered person and not wanting to abuse the system I guess running for the last flight was the right thing to do..!

In the end, my bag was delivered at home after a lot of empty promises from baggage handling - which was a bit of a PITA. First it would be delivered around 2-3pm the next day, then it became 6pm, then 8pm, then 10pm after another phone call - only for the courier to bring it to my door after midnight! Which meant I had to cancel a late afternoon and dinner appointment that day as I was waiting for the doorbell...

Alas, I enjoyed the flights (as well as the 120 XP) and look forward to fly AF again soon COVID-19 / restrictions permitting.

Goldorak

great report. Thank you

maalloc

LYS PRG in Y : abysmal service

Boarding was done with no respect to SkyPrirority.
Most hand luggage was forcefully checked in at the gate despite a 60% empty plane.

Now for the best part, the catering (lunchtime flight)
- No adult drinks
- No food
- Not even the « sweet or savory » option that used to be the baseline offer.


For the best part: this drink service was done by FAs not even wearing gloves. Even if I’m not freaking about Covid, seeing the FA handling your paper cup with bare hands, handling it from where your lips will be without gloves is questionable at normal times, and astonishing these days.

Oh well, maybe I should have bought the 99€ J upgrade proposed at OLCI. I’m curious how premium service would have been there.