Take your pet with you, or decide to keep it? If you don’t have a free plan to leave your dog or cat somewhere else while you go on a trip, then the question arises. And more and more. Air France, the French airline of the Air France-KLM group (with 83 million travelers in 2022), has decided to review its prices for our little furballs, reports Air Journal.
Every year, Air France says that more than 90,000 pets board its planes and that you will now have to pay a little more for your ticket to keep up with inflation. A decision taken also with regard to the prices charged by the competition, the difficulty of maintaining the service (many companies do not offer it) and the company’s desire to still offer preferential rates to certain destinations.
The main one is Reunion. From mainland France, Air France charges its prices according to the medium-haul scale, where the distance and flight time should rather place the trip among the long-haul ones. In terms of budget, this therefore amounts to paying 200 euros instead of 400 euros, a reduction with which Air France wishes to hide, to better pass the pill on other flights.
In terms of price increases, you won’t find anything under 100 euros (except for cabin flights within the country, at 70 euros).
Where some flights offered to board your pet for 55 or 75 euros, you will now have to rely on tickets at 125 or even 200 euros. A traveler accustomed to flights between Amsterdam and Toulouse wrote to lemon squeezer to express his frustration: from now on, his dog that he loves “like a son” will have to pay 200 euros instead of 100 euros previously. The increase is colossal.
The increase in fares for pets on Air France flights has already taken effect. As in the past, it is less expensive to put your travel companion in the cabin rather than in the hold. To be eligible for cabin travel, the pet must not exceed 6 kilos. It must also be at least 8 weeks old. For the hold, the animal exceeding 6 kilos must be at least over 15 weeks old.
Among the competition, many companies do not offer the transport of pets on their planes. The most original case is that of Emirates, which offers only one exception: falcons.
