Meet The Winners: Paris Charles De Gaulle Airport

Optimizing the use of its infrastructure by de-peaking new and existing services, increasing direct connectivity, and promoting healthy airline competition has led to sustainable development of Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG). In 2022, the airport witnessed significant growth welcoming 11 new carriers and opening 71 new routes.

Dufros highlighted how the airport has tackled the industry-wide challenge of crew and aircraft shortage by ensuring the attractiveness of the airport to potential airline partners: “We have designed an aggressive incentive scheme and it works – one of the successes of that has been Ottawa in Canada by Air France. We are specialized in designing those kinds of schemes and it is well received by the market.”   

As the most connected city in Europe, in terms of number of routes and unique destinations, traffic recovery is over 90% in the first nine months of 2023. With the highest number of unique carriers for any European airport, CDG is prioritising new-generation aircraft and promoting air-rail intermodality to support the group’s corporate strategy – 2025 Pioneers Plan.

Maja Gedosev, JetBlue Airways’ General Manager for Europe, stressed how the ADP aviation development team’s advanced traffic simulation models had underpinned the case for the daily Airbus A321LR services between JFK and CDG.

“Our close collaboration with Paris Charles de Gaulle Aviation Development team started at the very early stage of our transatlantic venture in 2018,” Gedosev says. “From that time, we had several interactions with them every year during when they provided us with detailed market analysis and route profitability simulation.

“I have to admit that the quality of the data analysis and of the local insights provided by their team have been crucial for JetBlue to take the decision of launching flights to Paris.”