Passengers at Charles de Gaul Airport, Paris
Air France-KLM has felt the effects of the November 13 Paris attacks on traffic in and out of the capital but said it is too early to predict the impact on Christmas holiday-season travel.
Aeroports de Paris said on Monday that the shootings had led to a 6 percent drop in the number of passengers passing through its Paris Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports in the second half of November.
“It’s evolving day by day. Careful, things are still uncertain and fragile,” Air France-KLM CEO Alexandre de Juniac said, adding that the airline had felt the impact “both in November and in December”.
Air France-KLM said on December 8 that it took a EUR€50 million revenue hit in November as a result of the shootings but remained on track to meet its 2015 targets.
Juniac said meanwhile that it was pushing forward with the expansion of its Transavia low-cost arm in Europe, with a new base planned in Munich in March.
“The dynamic is better than it was six months ago,” he said, although he declined to comment on progress in talks with unions in France.
Juniac added that he was looking to develop the carrier’s partnerships with airlines in Asia and the Middle East, a day after its Dutch arm KLM and alliance partner Delta Air Lines signed a codeshare agreement with India’s Jet Airways.
Juniac said the carrier hoped to negotiate “something resembling a revenue share system” with Gulf carrier Etihad, which owns 24 percent of Jet Airways.
He added that while Air France-KLM regularly sought to improve its partnerships with China Southern and China Eastern as part of its Asia strategy, they were a long way from being as advanced as with Delta.
The partnership with Delta, which dates from the 1990s, generated sales of over USD$13 billion last year, against more than EUR€800 million for the Chinese partnerships, which were set up in 2010 and 2012, he said.
