Why I don’t sell tickets to Air France
As I said before Air France consistently has the lowest fares to Europe from the US($200-500 less than competitors). That would be good enough reason to use them..but… They have a stipulation that I must sell a certain amount of land packages(car rental, hotel etc…) in order to sell the discounted tickets. Since I don’t offer those services I would have to sell them through my ticket company, which doesn’t have great rates on land products…. that means that the savings on the air tickets get eaten up by the higher costs for the hotels and land packages.
Some companies will sell the Air France “net fare” tickets without the accompanying land package, but Air France has been known to ask for the confirmation of auto rental, hotel room etc… and if the passenger didn’t produce the receipt from the company that issued the tickets, they were prevented from boarding the flight.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why Air France would care whether my company sold hotel rooms, auto rentals etc… in Greece. It has absolutely no bearing on their income stream…but wait… could it be another roadblock thrown in the way of the ticketing agent so that people will come directly to the airline…. putting futher pressure on the ticketing agent and pushing them closer to the brink of oblivion….I’m afraid so!
Well, we’ll see what the Ryan Air lawsuit brings to Air France(written about in the prior post). Olympic and Air France may pay a big price if it turns out they are recieving illegal subsidies from their respective governments.(Olympic has been proven to be taken the subsidies, Air France is just being accused of it)