Solevita

False friends are not your friend when in marketing.

Not exactly a false friend but always makes me chuckle. The train terminus in Swedish is the "slut station" where you may or may not encounter ladies of the night.

flyertalker00143

Wow 50€ per pax doesn’t even cover for the loss of one hotel night if you already booked a stay at the destination

I can imagine the marketing guy showing a presentation about this offer targeting « swingers »

hugolover

Compliant with EC261?
Not that AF is in many ways actually .

lynxy

This does not fall within the scope of EC261 as it is a voluntary change before the flight departure, not IDB. And AF is pretty good with EC261 !

Edit : AF is very insisting with the offer, I received the same email again this morning and a text message as well.

NickB

Clearly, if you are in that situation, you would not take it but the point of the offer is not to appeal to eveyone on the plane or a large number of passengers. From that perspective, it is entirely conceivable that that level of offer just works for AF to free the, say, one or two seats they might need.

NickB

Well, admittedly "swap" would be closer to the idea that they want to convey than "swing", but it seems to me that you are overly severe here. For one thing, "swing" (as distinct from "swinger") does not necessarily have the kind of sexual connotation that irishguy28 joked about. The idea that the use of "swing" here rather than another word would be likely to generate any reputational damage to AF seems to me extremely far-fetched and implausible.

More importantly, it seems to me that this is primarily targeted at the French market (as far as I can see, they only seem to describe it on the airfrance.fr versions of the site and not the other national versions) and this is largely in line with the French usage of needing to have a name for just about everything, in situation where, in English, you would not invent a word or name but merely describe the operation. I would suspect that an English airline doing the same would not feel the need to give a name for their practice (even if they had a word internally to describe it, they would not use it in communication with customers). They would not feel the need to describe this as an "offre" or "bon plan" that needs a name. In French, however, many companies would typically want to give such initiatives a marketing name and this reflects that. This is not something that is limited to marketing. French modern usage tends to adore the use of new substantives, especially foreign-derived ones (see how often French football journalists talk about the "mercato", showbiz journalists speak about "faire le buzz" or political journalists speak about "faire de la comm" or about "ιlιments de langage") and compare to how a British journalist would typically express themselves, describing actions rather than using a noun) . As someone who is semi-detached from France, I tend to find this usage somewhat irritating and slightly ridiculous but that is my problem. Each language/local usage has its own biases and oddities. Live and and let live and accept those, I suppose.

hugolover

Is it? Remind me of their Article 8 record... Don't they think Rebooking at a Later date of pax choosing is just a few days? .

Marambio

This has nothing to do with EC261. Take my case as an example. I cannot remember the exact details but there was an AF flight leaving 2 hours after mine. I honestly did not mind spending 2 more hours in Berlin and 50 euros, while not a lot, is always nice. In the end I did not use the offer and was allowed in my originally booked flight without any issues.

brunos

This kind of email offer has been ongoing for years.
It seems nice to offer it in advance to find volunteers to switch flights.

Let me add my pinch of chili and say that I find some reactions to "swing" based on a biased group of naughty posters.
My immediate reaction was to think of golf swing....

BRC

Recently received an offer to switch CDG-SIN to a different date for 150€. Obviously this felt low and I didn't consider it, but it feels even lower knowing that the offer for European flights is 50€!

What was interesting is that I had a connection to SQ on the same ticket, but neither the email nor the Swing website showed anything beyond SIN, so I'm not sure what would've happened to my connection had I elected to fly to SIN a day or two later...

irishguy28

Was the website actually offering later flights only (flights that would have broken the connection)?

BRC

Indeed. I was able to switch to every CDG-SIN flight (both midday AF182 and evening AF256) over the following four days or so. I was travelling on one of the days where the evening flight was the only one operating, meaning leaving at midday wasn't an option, meaning all the flights offered would've resulted in me arriving many, many hours after my connecting flight had left. I'd like to think a call to the PSL would've eventually fixed this had I accepted the offer, but for 150€ I had no interest in taking that risk

irishguy28

That's incredibly worrying.

They should not be offering this "option" to those with onward connections because - as you say - they clearly aren't even considering the disruption that this would cause if such a customer unwittingly took up this offer and ended up losing their SQ flights...

It seems a very basic flaw in their coding that they don't limit these offers only to O&D passengers and - if offered to connection passengers at all - only to those on the final segment of an inbound/outbound part of a connecting itinerary such that selecting any of the choices offered doesn't "break" the logic of the ticket.

Porcepic

DP to continue on the wonderful AF IT: I took the offer to switch/swing for the previous flight to TLS. I did that very late, about an hour before the planned departure time, having just landed at CDG (on another ticket) and the new flight to TLS being obviously late.

The website failed (« cette demande n’a pu aboutir »). On the AF app, my original flight to TLS was though shown as cancelled and the new flight to TLS added but without any way to retrieve the boarding pass.

Had to go the service desk. Checkin was already closed but they still achieved to give me one of the last seat of the flights (about a dozen of GP on than flight, told the agent at the desk I hoped I had not taken a GP’s seat… « ne vous inquiιtez pas tout va bien pour les GP ! »).

I have not received the 50€ voucher yet (I assume the process failed and I will never get it). I will complain to AF and write here about the answer.

more4less

Just received the swing offer for flying tomorrow instead of today, against a compensation of 75 euros.

With this amount, most likely, I cannot even pay the IBIS at CDG.