In the airline’s own words, ‘Air France is constantly looking at opportunities to develop its offer, in order to best meet customer expectations in line with market trends’. For passengers, this will mean the end of the light snacks offered in economy, in favour of a Buy on board offer.
Air France and KLM reduce on-board service on medium-haul routes
The French airline has therefore announced that it will be trialling a paid catering service on board its medium-haul flights in 2025. This will involve two routes (from Paris CDG to Lisbon and Helsinki) and the lessons learnt from this experiment will enable the airline to decide whether or not to extend this offer. It will replace the free service currently offered on board (small sandwiches or pastries).
The same is true at KLM, where there is even talk of abolishing the free economy service on the entire medium-haul network by 2025.
An already shrunken offering
This is not the first attempt by the Franco-Dutch group to downgrade its medium-haul service. For several years now, hot meals have disappeared from even the most distant destinations and business class.
10 years ago, you had hot meals in business class on a Paris-Stockholm flight and in economy on a Paris-Athens flight. Those days are gone.
A free offering you won’t regret?
Having said that, we can look at things another way: free services in medium-haul economy class have already disappeared at Lufthansa and Swiss, for example, but both airlines have maintained a hot meal service in business class for flights of a certain duration (2 hours at Swiss).
Remember that Air France’s medium-haul network includes destinations as far afield as North Africa and the Middle East.
On the other hand, Turkish Airlines offers hot meals in economy on domestic flights of less than an hour, and we won’t even make the comparison with Asian airlines, as it would be so cruel for Western European airlines.
And given the quality of the service currently on offer, it’s logical to ask whether it wouldn’t be better to pay for something of quality and substance rather than an insipid free mini sandwich. That’s what all the companies are saying: if you can’t offer something decent for free, you might as well charge for something better.
To which we reply: can’t we envisage doing something good for free? After all, other airlines manage to do this, and the price of a meal on a medium-haul Economy flight (5 to 10 euros) is not going to change a thing.
In short, this is yet another step towards the unbundling of services, which poses a fundamental problem for passengers, who see services constantly being cut without any reduction in ticket price!
However, there is one bright spot in this gloomy landscape: Lufthansa is in the process of reversing course and is thinking of reintroducing free snacks in economy class on its medium-haul flights.
On the other hand, we wondered how the SAS offer would evolve to bring it into line with that of the other Skyteam airlines, starting with Air France and KLM.
A true medium-haul business class at SAS
Until now, the Scandinavian airline has only offered a kind of premium economy on medium-haul routes, called ‘SAS Plus’. The service provided on board, although very decent, was far from business class, and the middle seats were not blocked.
The airline confirmed this week that it would be aligning its product with those of its partners (something it had not done within Star Alliance) with a new business class including the blocking of middle seats and, more surprisingly, hot meals.
This new offer will apply to medium-haul flights to Europe, with intra-Scandinavian flights continuing to have SAS Plus.
Bottom line
Air France and KLM seem intent on continuing the worrying deterioration in their medium-haul product by replacing the free (albeit meagre) snacks served in medium-haul economy with a paid-for catering offer, in the opposite direction to the trend currently underway at Lufthansa.
The good news is that SAS will be abandoning its SAS Plus product in favour of a genuine business class service.
What about you? What do you think of these announcements?
Image : Air France A220 by kamilpetran via Shutterstock.
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