Air News : HOP!, Delta Air Lines, Air France, Air Caraïbes, Tap Air Portugal, Turkish Airlines, etc.

The 12-24 year-old youth card, previously available on around 100 domestic routes in the HOP! network, has been extended to Air France and Joon medium-haul routes since yesterday, October 10, 2018: Norway, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, United Kingdom, Ireland, Russia, Armenia, Ukraine, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia. The Youth Card is sold only in France and provides access to price offers of up to 35% discount. The card is thus amortized from the second trip.

The opening of the new Toulon-Hyères – Paris Roissy Charles-De-Gaulle line by Air France last March was a great success. The filling rate is about 90%. Many use the line to get to Paris more than to continue international. However, Air France had created the line to enable the inhabitants of Var to use the Air France KLM hub at Roissy for all « medium and long haul » destinations abroad. With two flights a day, seven days a week, one in the morning and one in the evening, to CDG, traffic increased by 9%. Based on this experience, Air France plans to increase the number of flights to CDG in order to further improve connectivity to CDG because, with two flights, all possible connections with long-haul flights are more difficult. In Marseille and Nice, AF operates six daily flights to CDG.

Until November 25, 2018, Air Caraïbes will be present in the 1200 points of sale and 850 Selectour labelled agencies. Various measures have been put in place as part of this operation:
A digital showcase campaign in the 800 branches of the network equipped with a digital slab and a relay of the offer on the Selectour website www.selectour.com until 20 October 2018.
A BtoB communication with the network’s salespeople (Saphir and Pop Amadeus Intranet communication) relayed until the end of November 2018.

Following the enthusiastic reactions of its travellers, Delta Air Lines has extended its meal pre-selection service to Delta One customers departing from Paris Charles de Gaulle, allowing them to choose their meal on all flights to the United States. This initiative follows a trial period on some flights from the United States. The pre-selection service has proved so popular that it has since been extended to more than 100 markets around the world.

Customers receive an email from Delta Air Lines three days before their flight, inviting them to choose their favourite meal from the season menu at Delta Air Lines’ regional influences. This pre-selection option ensures that all customers travelling in Delta One can enjoy their first choice of meal on all flights to and from the United States.

The company Voletea moved to Nice Toulouse in April 2019. Since the cessation of direct Air France Hop flights between Nice and Toulouse, only the
Easyjet company provided the connection with a frequency of one to two daily flights. From April Volotea decided to operate on this line with
to start two flights a week over the year. But according to Edo Friart, Volotea’s development director, demand on this line is strong and commercial results are on track, Volotea will increase its frequencies.

Nice Bergen: SAS Scandinavian Airlines arrives: Sas will open a route between Nice and Bergen (Norway) for the summer season, currently served by Norvwegian with two flights per week.

The company Tap Air Portugal announced the delivery of 15 new aircraft in 2019 and the opening of 15 new routes: Tel-Aviv, Basel, Dublin, Teneriffe, Naples, Montreal, Chicago, Washington, San Francisco, San Francisco, Conakry, Banjul, Porto-Bruxelles, Porto-Lyon, Porto-Munich and New York Newark.

In the summer of 2019 British Airways will become daily between London and Nashville, its 26th destination in the United States pending the opening of Pittsburgh. On March 31, the airline will expand to seven weekly rotations, still operated by Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, which can accommodate 35 passengers in Business Class, 25 in Premium and 154 in Economy.

To travel to Canada next summer, Air Transat offers six accessible Canadian cities from Paris, increasing the weekly frequency of its flights from Nice and Basel-Mulhouse. At the same time, the company maintains a very complete programme from Marseille, Toulouse, Lyon, Bordeaux and Nantes.
It should be noted that residents of the Nice region will benefit from an additional flight to Montreal, for a total of 3 flights per week at the height of the season. Regular Basel-Mulhouse airport customers will also benefit from an additional flight to Montreal, for a total of 2 flights per week. Departures from Nice and Basel-Mulhouse to Montreal and flights from Paris to Quebec City will be on brand new, latest-generation, single-aisle Airbus A321neo LR aircraft.

The future Nice terminal calibrated for Easyjet? The question arises and the press briefing a few days ago by Easyjet at Nice airport to announce the strengthening of its base echoes the announcement made at the beginning of the summer by the Côte d’Azur airports company of the creation of an extension to the T2. This project, known as T2-3 terminal as an extension of T2, seems to perfectly meet the needs of a company such as « Easyjet both in terms of capacity (4 million passengers and the traffic planned for Nice by Easyjet in 2020) and in terms of composition: a long jetty with contactless aircraft stations corresponds entirely to the current traffic operated on the old T2-1. A T2-1 that was built at the time for Air France. Today it has been entirely phagocytic by Easyjet flights (40 destinations). A terminal that, pending the extension, must decide to expand its rooms to meet the British company’s increased traffic.

This winter, easyJet is offering more than 600,000 additional seats for sale in France, for a total of nearly 7 million seats. Compared to the previous season, the airline increased its overall offer by 8.5% and by nearly 9% on domestic flights.

To expand its winter programme, easyJet is annualising several of its seasonal routes, adding frequencies on its flagship routes and announcing the launch of a new Toulouse-Tenerife route (operated from December). This new destination from Toulouse thus brings the number of new routes of the company – most of which have already been announced – for the winter of 2018-2019 to 9, namely Toulouse:

Toulouse-Marrakech (year-round),
> Toulouse-Liverpool (for winter),
> Toulouse-Tenerife (for winter)

From 4 April 2019, Turkish Airlines will operate daily to Sharjah (SHJ) from its Istanbul hub. Located along the southern coast of the Persian Gulf, in the Arabian Peninsula about 30km from Dubai, Sharjah is the third largest city in the Emirates.
This destination complements Turkish Airlines’ offer to the Emirates, for which it already serves Dubai with 3 daily flights and Abu Dhabi with 11 weekly flights.

Virgin Australia has just announced that it has started voice recording with Amazon assistant Alexa. The only requirement is to have linked your Velocity account. This new service will provide you with the flight departure time, Velocity account number, flight number and reservation reference.