Air France to Launch Paris CDG – Cancun Connection

Air France is to launch a three times weekly service between Paris CDG and Cancun from October 21, boosting links between France and Mexico. The airline already offers 10 flights per week between Paris and Mexico City, while its fellow SkyTeam alliance member Aeromexico offers a weekly schedule between the two cities.

The launch of this new link follows initial discussions at the World Routes event in Vancouver, Canada last year, according to ASUR's Route Development Team. “ASUR met with Air France during Routes 2010 to talk about a potential Paris – Cancun service and the carrier noted that it could profit not only from its home French market, but also from some of the underserved European markets to Cancun – namely Italy, Russia and Scandinavia – thanks to its strong connectivity at its Paris CDG hub.”

The airline will be targeting a high-end market and will utilise a two-class, 472-seat Boeing 777-300 on the route, which includes a 14-seat Affaires Business Class cabin. Cancun currently has around 72,000 hotel rooms available of which 76 per cent are five-star or greater. “Cancun is certainly a high-end product,” noted an ASUR representative, “plus it has the critical mass of being the largest destination in the Caribbean to support this traffic.”

Source: Flightbase (April 14-20, 2011)

Air France will be only the second European flag carrier to offer non-stop flights to Cancun, alongside British Airways which offers a three times weekly service from London. This operates from Gatwick rather than its main Heathrow hub, due to the large number of leisure travellers it handles, but means the carrier misses out on potential feed. The other eight European cities linked to Cancun are served by leisure carriers, with XL Airways already providing flights from Paris CDG using an Airbus A330-200 on its three times weekly services. British Airways, Condor, Martinair and XL Airways all provide more than 1,000 seats per week, but Spanish carrier Air Europa is the largest airline on the route, offering more than 2,000 seats on its nine times weekly flight from Madrid Barajas. When Air France inaugurates its link in October it will offer 1,416 seats per week. Leisure carriers Thomas Cook Airlines and Thomsonfly also offer a large number of services from the UK but their flights are not included in this analysis.

“The new service shows the potential of the European market to Cancun, which accounted for 1.2 million direct passengers in 2010, and which is 14 per cent up year-to-date,” explained a representative of the ASUR Route Development Team. “It also confirms that Cancun can attract not only leisure passengers, but also premium passengers.”

According to traffic data, around 48,000 O&D passengers travelled between Paris CDG and Cancun in the 12 months to January 2011 with less than half of these using Star Airlines’ direct flight. Alongside feed in Europe, Air France will also be able generate additional traffic by working with its SkyTeam partners Aeromexico and Delta to provide onward connections across North, South and Latin America, as well as the Caribbean. Aeromexico currently offers domestic links to Cozumel, Havana, Merida and Mexico City, while Delta has direct flights from Cancun to 15 US cities.