On Wednesday, September 28, 2017, Corsair and La Compagnieannounced a partnership that is still unheard of in France, since it is an alliance with a low-cost airline, in this case EasyJet. Why such a duo? Simply because the hub system operated by the major airlines proves to be extremely efficient in filling long-haul aircraft, and the two French airlines have understood this!
A real and important need for connections at each end of the line
For the moment, connecting passengers on the two French airlines represent only 8% of the total number of passengers. And still, these passengers “suffer” a lot during their connection: they have separate tickets, due to the lack of partnership, and the airlines in Europe are very reluctant to check in luggage on separate transport contracts. As a result,the passenger experience is very degraded, with baggage having to be systematically retrieved and rechecked, and sometimes having to go through police and security checks that would have been unnecessary had the baggage been checked.
To compensate for this lack of air partners outside of Air France, the French long-haul airlines have developed a partnership called TGV Air, which allows passengers to purchase their train tickets as pre- and post-trip, but again with significant load breaks.
Finally, the domestic market ends up being narrow for these French long-haul airlines, and their development is limited.
So many good reasons to find an ally that can irrigate Europe from its point of departure
Why is EasyJet a good partner?
Don’t get us wrong: these kinds of partnerships already exist, albeit to a lesser extent. Emirates, for example, has partnered with EasyJet and JetBlue to sell tickets to and from various European and U.S. cities as a continuation of an EK flight.
On the other hand, the recently signed agreement goes much further for the French airlines, as it gives EasyJet the right to market the flights of these airlines on its own very powerful website.
In addition, EasyJet has an extensive domestic and European network at both Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle and Orly, and operates in “classic” terminals (as opposed to low-cost terminals).
However, particularly at Orly, this partnership can only be effectiveif connection courses are in place, which is not yet the case at Orly.
Conclusion
Finally some movement in French air transport. How far can it go? Why aren’t XL Airways (from the same group as La Compagnie) and Air Caraïbes (which code-shares a lot with Corsair) included? Answers in the coming weeks!
