French Airline La Compagnie Looking To Strong Summer

French boutique airline La Compagnie is adding frequencies between Newark and Paris this spring and summer to cater to growing demand on both sides of the pond, said Jean Charles Perino, executive vice president of sales and distribution of the all-business-class line.   

On its sole route, the carrier operates a daily roundtrip and a second flight three days a week. That will increase to six flights a week by June 1, giving the airline a total of 13 departures a week in each direction.  

Perino credited travel agents for helping to raise the line’s profile in the crowded field of transatlantic airlines.  

“The travel agencies’ share of our sales has been skyrocketing,” he said.  He said more than 40% of the line’s ticket distribution is through retailers.  “From the very start we understood that while you have to be strong on the web, you also have to be strong in the travel agency community.”

The three-year-old carrier recently merged with a larger budget line, XL Airways, a move that Perino said will help La Compagnie realize greater economies of scale and help it to keep costs down. And XL’s relationships with leisure-oriented travel agencies will help boost both lines’ fortunes as well. But other than that, the two airlines will operate as separate carriers with their own distinct brands. 

And they are very different: XL Airways operates discount flights on more than 10 long-haul routes to the U.S.,  the Caribbean and elsewhere with a fleet of widebody Airbus A330 aircraft. La Compagnie serves a single route – Newark to Paris Charles De Gaulle, with a fleet of two 757 jets with 74 lie-flat seats, in a 2×2 layout. The carrier had added a Newark-London flight in 2015, but later discontinued that service, blaming a lessening of demand brought on, in part, by Brexit worries. 

While La Compagnie isn’t the only boutique line in the New York-Paris market – it competes with BA’s Open Skies unit – Perino pointed out that his company is the only one adhering to a value-oriented, all premium class approach.  It periodically offers roundtrip fares as low as $1,300 roundtrip for what could be described as a business class “lite” – with many of the trappings of that class, short of the now-requisite fully-flat bed.

Perino said that nearly 40% of the carrier’s traffic is repeat business, citing surveys showing that 94% of the airline’s passengers say they would fly with them again.

The U.S. market accounts for more of the carrier’s business too. While at first the carrier was far better known in its home country,  more than 50% of customers now hail from the U.S., Perino said, and that share is expected to grow this year.