Paris Orly Airport: Air France shrinks as its LCC Transavia grows, but easyJet & Vueling grow faster

The Paris terrorist attacks on 13-Nov-2015 interrupted a healthy year of traffic growth at Paris Orly Airport but did not prevent it from posting record passenger numbers for the year. Its traffic suffered more in the global downturn than that of its larger sibling airport, Paris CDG, but it also recovered more strongly. However, Orly's growth has been slower than CDG's in the past two years, since Air France's network cuts at its number two airport have offset LCC expansion there.

As a low cost market Orly is relatively small, but it has the distinction of being an important base for the LCC subsidiary of two of Europe's Big Three legacy airline groups. It is the second largest base for Air France-KLM's Transavia, and the third largest for IAG's Vueling. However, both have much less capacity there than easyJet, for whom Orly is only the tenth largest airport.

Transavia's growth, while Air France shrinks, is little more than maintaining Air France-KLM's traffic at Orly. It is not maintaining the group's market share, since Vueling and easyJet are growing faster. A 2014 agreement with pilots limits Air France-KLM's room for manoeuvre.