hhdl

None of those have that strong of an O&D market to Paris, so the demand would be cross-shopping AF against other airlines where both require a connection to the desired destination.

La Francophonie, though, tends to have strong O&D to Paris. The going rate for P to ABJ appears to be about 10k USD one-way for this monopoly route.

Goldorak

you obviously have no knowledge of African market (I'm not making any reproach here ) and how whealthy some people are on top of the diplomatic traffic as mentioned by other posters. For instance the AF IAD flight has very often African diplomats/ministers connecting in CDG. AF used to have a lot of P routes in Africa a few years ago. There was also a very prominent thinking in many African countries that "the shortest route between 2 African capitals is via Paris ". This was because of the very bad local airlines and with a poor safety record and because they could afford it. It's certainly less true now.
With the decrease of number of aircrafts with P they actually have and their policy to increase the fares +++, they likely have seen that they can make more profits on the other current routes. We'll see what happen with new aircraft equipped with P.

ofj

No offense taken. However, If we are talking about pure wealth, no way the current/former African LP destinations are wealthier than the business/family wealth population of China or Korea. Don't even go there. There are some wealthy people, but it's MUCH more heavily saturated in the Far East - China alone has more millionaires AND billionaires than any country other than the USA.

Sure, I get that there is a Francophone relationship which the Far East doesn't have. And yes, I don't know the African market, but that's my point - something has to be in play other than just pure wealth of the destination populace. If you're saying that it's due to diplomatic traffic, ok that's understandable. If you're saying that the rich in Africa are more willing to splurge, then sure.

In the end, as others have stated above, maybe AF doesn't see as much demand for LP for various reasons. Maybe KE F is good enough for wealthy Koreans. Maybe Chinese prefer the CX and MU F cabins because they're simply much cheaper. Who knows.

Goldorak

You are all correct. One factor that plays an important role is that Africa has few good, safe and reliable airlines while there are tons of those in Asia with a top notch service. And you can add to this the language barrier making it more natural for Asian people to book with a carrier from their own country.

CptnInc

They also sometimes fly P birds on routes with no P service available (ie, BOS-CDG). Not sure if that is a frequent enough occurrence to meaningfully change your numbers though.

Digicola

In the case of Africa, AF has long enjoyed a monopoly on P traffic out of the continent. Over the years EK and LH have been trying to erode that with varying degrees of success. Honestly you just need to look at AF’s J prices to some of these destinations, they are absolutely eye watering!

They also served as quick turnarounds for fleet utilisation whilst being able to take a bit of cream from the top of the market. Once again, quite niche but lucrative for AF.

PVG and HKG will come back eventually. I believe PEK also had LP? I know a few in the diplomatic circles in Europe and Africa that always favoured LP for trips to and from PEK.

ICN just isn’t a high yield premium destination for AF. For the longest time they sent planes with the smallest J cabins possible with capacity bumps during the summer. KE provides a lot of capacity in the market and having flown on their A380 a few time I can tell you that unlike LAX and JFK, CDG was often empty up front. And thats with Koreans highly preferring their own airlines. Chinese airlines also absolutely decimated yields on that axis.

Lastly, I think CGK was also a LP destination about a decade ago during the days of the short 5th freedom tag to CDG-SIN. That obviously didn’t last long.

San Gottardo

ICN was a P destination a long time ago, I think around the same time as CGK. I flew to ICN in P, at the time when the Salon Premiere was the upper floor of the 2K lounge. I think around 2007-2008.

And then of course there were the times when every plane in the long haul fleet had First Class (Espace 180 on B747s, A340s, etc) and every little hamlet in Africa served by AF had Premiere service. But that was before the serious upgrading of Premiere to the version preceding the current one (the one installed on the A380 and also 777s) and the launch of the dedicated Premiere lounge (first, as mentioned above, on the upper floor of the current 2K lounge, and then later on moved to its dedicated space, where it still is today) and the car service.