Last year, Airfrance-KLM rolled-out a very limited launch of wifi on its flights – Paris.New York (Air France) and Amsterdam-Panama (KLM) at a price of 10.95 eur for one hour and 19.99 eur for connectivity for the entire flight. Presumably, the first experiment proved to be enough of a success for them to establish a partnership with Orange and continue testing on additional flghts. This time the focus, however, will be on short and medium-haul flights on 2 Airbus 380s. The tests will kick-off in summer 2015 and will take continue for a period of three months.
In a recent study with 2k passengers, Air France found that the vast majority of its clients, roughly 78%, are interested in having access to wifi on-board. However, travelers don’t seem to view wifi access as an additional service they should have to pay for as only 28% expressed that they would be ready to pay for wifi access on-board. Most other airlines that offer wifi on-board do charge for the service, so Airfrance’s offer is in-line with the industry norm on this.
Airfrance is quite late to the game though in terms of offering wifi on their flights. Several of the biggest global airlines (i.e. Emirates, Lufthansa, American, etc), already offer wifi on a large percentage of their flights and some, particularly in Asia, offer free basic wifi access. So it looks like Airfrance has some catching-up to do.