The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Air France's Paris-Chennai inaugural flight lands

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Wednesday, Nov 01, 2006
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Air France's Paris-Chennai inaugural flight lands

Priscilla Jebaraj

The direct flight is to woo businessmen

CHENNAI: Air France's inaugural flight from Paris landed at Chennai airport in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and as the passengers disembarked, the gracious French crew waved them off with nandri, not merci.

From menus in Tamil to the comforting familiarity of rice and paruppu meals and the Pondicherry-born, Tamil-speaking stewards, no effort is spared to ensure that Chennai travellers feel at home.

Besides tourists, the direct flight is trying to lure Tamil Nadu's businessmen and IT professionals travelling to Europe and the U.S.

John, who works with a Chennai garment export firm, is trying Air France for the first time and will probably encourage his firm to regularly use the airline. That's exactly what Dominique Gass, Air France's general manager for South Asia, is looking for. "Our biggest strategy is to aim for corporates, both big and small. We try to make long-term customers," he says.

Air France offers a frequent flyer programme, specifically aimed at small and medium enterprises, through which they can accumulate a pool of joint reward points every time an employee uses the airline.

Mr. Gass recognises that the "industry network in Tamil Nadu is more diversified than in Bangalore", where software companies are the largest corporate clients. Here, there are more SMEs who send employees abroad, especially firms which export car parts, textiles and even shoes, he says. Soundar Rajane, a travel agent on the flight agrees, saying that a large number of his clients are from the Tirupur textile cluster.

Settling into the comfortable new l'Espace seat, with its shell-like structure and lie-flat seat bed, that is being used in the business class on the Chennai flight, Mr. Gass says that France has a "shared cultural heritage" with South India. A large number of the passengers on this inaugural flight are either Indian residents of Puducherry visiting relatives in France, or French citizens who left Puducherry decades ago, but who still say they are "going home".

Over fifty per cent of the passengers were students, IT professionals and NRI families travelling from the U.K. and the U.S. Most transit passengers still fly Lufthansa via Frankfurt, but Air France is trying to wean away more of this lucrative traffic, promoting Paris as a hub. At just Rs. 16,500 plus taxes for a Chennai-London return ticket and Rs. 32,900 plus taxes for the Chennai-New York flight, it's begun attracting several first-time customers.

Air France hosted Indian journalists on the inaugural flight.

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