(Bloomberg) -- To get into Air France’s newest lounge at Charles de Gaulle Airport, you’ll have to pay up, and not just for the price of a La Premiere first-class ticket. To reward its highest-spending passengers, the French carrier has introduced its most exclusive offering yet: Three private suites within the expanded 10,700-square-foot flagship La Premiere lounge, each meant to feel more like a chic Parisian hotel room than an airport lounge space.
The suites span nearly 500 square feet—comparable to a deluxe room at celebrated five-star hotel Le Bristol—and feature butler service, double beds with crisp linens, a generous living room area gussied up with fresh flowers and fruit, and even outdoor patios. When it’s time to catch their flight, guests will get shuttled directly to the aircraft door in a Porsche Cayenne or Mercedes van.
But unlike other lounge services, which are baked into the price of a business or first-class seat, all this comes at an additional cost. For every three-hour time slot they want to reserve in a private suite, Air France’s first-class flyers will need to shell out an additional €800 ($871)—as much as it would cost to fly economy from New York to Paris in the offseason. Think of it as a lounge within the lounge, made especially for the VVIP who’s already paying upwards of $10,000 for a transcontinental La Premiere ticket. The announcement coincides with the start of the Paris Olympics, at a time when the carrier is warning of a revenue shortfall at its French operations.
The new departures experience is “very, very exclusive and like checking into a luxury hotel,” says Air France-KLM Group Chief Executive Officer Ben Smith. He added that the company spent “multi millions” to build the suites at Charles de Gaulle airport. “It’s quite an investment. It’s like building a very, very, very big apartment building,” the 52-year-old CEO says, speaking to Bloomberg by phone.
Exclusive is right: The airline currently has four La Premiere seats installed in each of 19 Boeing 770-300 ER planes. Smith says the goal is to expand the service to 25 planes in coming years, meaning “at least” 50 flights a day.
The private suites come at a time when airlines are increasingly breaking up their business- and first-class cabins to offer a wide array of premium seats—think premium economy, but in the front sections of the plane. On airlines from Lufthansa to Air New Zealand, those premium seats are now separated into as many as five discrete categories, with varying amenities, features and prices. The German carrier, for instance, has stratified its business-class cabins to offer front row seats with extra legroom and blocks of seats with extra-long beds; its new First Class Suite Plus seats will be among some of the widest in the sky.
It’s not just airlines racing to provide an increasingly luxurious experience. The Air France suites bear a resemblance to LAX’s famed PS lounge (formerly called Private Suite), which includes a private terminal for TSA and customs. That concept expanded to Atlanta last year, where each visit costs $4,850. Locations at Dallas-Fort Worth and Miami are in development.
Even American Express Co. has joined in on the trend, adding exclusive spaces within its Centurion airport lounges in places like Washington, DC, for customers who hold the eponymous black card.
Air France’s Smith says the market is ripe for these products, even as the post-pandemic revenge travel boom wanes. He says La Premiere is increasingly attracting CEOs and other senior executives who are avoiding private jets for environmental or cost reasons but still value privacy. Some CEOs, he says, will book the entire four-suite cabin for themselves. In some cases, doing so can amount to less than half—or in some cases 25%—of the cost of flying private, Smith explains.
“We are perfectly happy to let some seats go empty, because we want to keep it exclusive,” Smith says. “There’s no single US airline that’s been able to maintain first class. They all had first class products and they pulled them all. If you don’t treat them like luxury products, customers won’t pay.”
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