Air France to use free WiFi to boost Flying Blue

Air France will soon be offering a free in-flight WiFi service based on the Starlink network, the world’s largest constellation of satellites using low-Earth orbit.

Free Wi-Fi for Flying Blue members

This announcement was made last week, so you’ve probably already seen it, and there’s not much more to say on the subject. However, we can only welcome the fact that Air France is offering all its passengers free, high-quality WiFi on an unlimited number of aircraft. It remains to be seen whether, for medium-haul passengers, this will compensate for the announced deterioration in on-board service. And why not?

But there’s something even more interesting in this announcement: wifi will be free as long as you log on with your Flying Blue account. If you don’t have a Flying Blue account, you won’t be able to use the wifi, as there doesn’t seem to be a paying offer co-existing with the free offer for non-members.

Behind this offer there is nothing more and nothing less than a marketing strategy aimed at boosting the number of members of the Flying Blue frequent flyer program, and this is part of a real business logic.

Loyalty programs are a financial windfall

If, intuitively, you might think that a loyalty program is a financial burden for an airlinethis is not the case. On the contrary, airlines can earn astronomical sums from their frequent flyer programs, sometimes more than they earn from flying airplanes, to the point where the airline’s value can be lower than that of its frequent flyer program.

For a long time, monetizing the loyalty program didn’t seem to be a priority for Air France, which was one of the few airlines not to have made its program an independent subsidiary. But Flying Blue was finally spun off in 2023, showing that the airline had finally decided to turn its program into a revenue-generating machine.

But for this to happen, you need a critical mass of members, which is not the case here. According to the latest figures available to us, Flying Blue has 19 million members, compared with 115 million for AAdvantage (American Airlines) and over 110 million for Skymiles (Delta). Closer to home, MilesMore (Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian Airlines, etc.) has 30 million members!

It was therefore urgent for Flying Blue to boost its membership numbers, which were too low compared with similar-sized airlines, before thinking about maximizing revenue per member. And what could be simpler than making it compulsory to have a Flying Blue account in order to connect to the Internet?

Membership does not mean revenue

This is really good business and not a new strategy. This is the case with Delta Airlines, for example, and I actually have a Skymiles account that serves no other purpose than to connect to the Wifi.

So it wouldn’t be surprising to hear in the next couple of days that the number of Flying Blue members has suddenly soared. But will this translate into revenue? I have my doubts.

For this to happen, members would have to actually use their accounts to earn and spend miles, in particular with partners who would buy the miles from Flying Blue, or, better still, subscribe to a co-branded credit card if one existed in the country of residence, which seems highly unlikely to me.

A member of another Skyteam frequent flyer program will always have an interest in focusing on his own program, and a member of a competing alliance will use his account on the rare occasions when he flies on Skyteam, but this will remain marginal in terms of business, since he will favor his main program whenever possible.

Bottom line

In a bid to boost the business of its Flying Blue frequent flyer program, Air France has come up with an effective, if not original, way of increasing the number of members. But that’s only the first stage of the rocket, as the next step will be to improve revenue per member, which will be a different kettle of fish, but first things first.