The low cost company imposed itself upon one of the most expensive European lines. In Nice after having opened a low cost rent-a-car office, the company is about to open a cyber-café and fly over new destinations.
Friday, October 18 in the afternoon, a release announced: Air France will cancel the Nice-Geneva line from September 4, 2000 (2 flights a day). Since the summer 1999, the French company has been in high competition with easyjet for the line. Easyjet was selling flights for less than 400 francs!
The ticket price was very impressive and of course attractive for a line considered very expensive (normal price: 3,000 francs), before the arrival of Easyjet. Air France has thus preferred to cancel the line. On the easyjet web site, you can read: classical companies cannot sell cheaper and abandon their flights over short lines and prefer focus on high traffic lines.
61% of market share in 18 months
The Air France market share for the destination (180,000 passengers in 1999) had dropped until 7%. Whereas Easyjet in just a bit more than 18 months had gained 61% of market share (Air Littoral, a Swissair subsidiary operating on the line had kept a 30% passengers traffic). Why Easyjet has succeeded? Prices! 180FF for a single ticket (or 360FF a round-trip ticket), whereas the cheapest price Air France proposed for a ticket was 740FF.
Easyjet which was founded by the young Greco-British billionaire Stelios Haji-lonnaou, confirms its arrival in Nice, the only French airport where the company is. With 6 daily flights to Luton airport in northern London (35% of the traffic were gained by the company against British Airways and British Midlands), one flight a day to Liverpool and three daily flights to Geneva, the low cost company should reach 600,000 passengers for this year.
Nice-Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona and …Paris
From a strategy of trade sales on the web (the company which is not distributed in travel agencies has reached a 80.6% rate of sales on the web for the first week of August), the company wants to go further on. The company should benefit from a capital contribution after its introduction to the stock exchange within some weeks.
In Nice, the company has already added to its original activities, a service to rent cars: Easyjetrentacar at the Arenas since July 2000, only Mercedes class A (400 cars) for 95 FF a day. The competition seems to be launched with, this time, rent-a-car firms.
And still in Nice, the company has new projects like a cyber-café for the spring 2001: easyEverything. Stelios Haji-Lonnaou has already opened 9 gigantic cyber-cafés throughout the world: New-York (850 PCs), Paris, Madrid, Brussels, Rotterdam… The access to the web is very cheap. And another of its future aims: the opening of new lines: Nice-Amsterdam from 2001, Nice-Athens and Nice-Barcelona and maybe a Nice-Paris with 300FF the return ticket. The 'EasyGroup' CEO is just beginning to turn upside down the French Riviera sky!