Air France is preparing to refurbish its Boeing 777 and Airbus A380 fleets in a bid to fight back from other carriers it seems.
Their entire fleet of Boeing 777’s are to be to refurbished where the airline will spend “hundreds of millions of euros” according to Air France’s CEO Alexandre de Juniac.
The airline is aiming to improve its onboard product and service to make it “world-class standard” to compete with Gulf and Asian airlines
Air France is aiming to have the refurbishment complete by 2015, which will refit 19 Boeing 777-300ER’s and 25 Boeing 777-200. Additionally, an additional refurbishment of 10aircraft in the A380 fleet commence in 2015.
New aircraft will be a quiet tone for AirFrance-KLM group, with no new aircraft scheduled to join the fleet until the 787-9’s come on-line in 2016 (for KLM) and the A350’s in 2017 (for Air France).
Upgrading any product is never a bad idea – however to be world class, this means also examining the facilities in the back of the plane as well as the front. It’ll be interesting to see what Air France do to these aircraft and how they can make them “World Class”… as well as boosting the soft product too.
I assume this will mean flat bed seats in business. Unfortunately, by 2016, that seat will probably cost 1,000,000 SkyMiles.
@Gene … plus tax and fuel surcharges….
And by 2016, “world class” business from SQ may already look like F from today
The biggest innovation is probably just a decision to spend on marketing and advertisement the majority of the funds to advertise their fleet as “world class”.
Of course airlines are constantly evaluating these things, but it’s probably timed in response to LH’s Hotel Business Class campaign for new C.