La Compagnie Is Moving To Paris Orly (From Charles De Gaulle)

@ Lucky: La Compagnie should be fine in Orly as long as they can operate from Orly-Sud (South). The Orly -Ouest (West) terminal is pure hell for those (very few) passengers arriving from Non-Shengen origins (i.e outside a zone of the European Union where there are no more passport controls and customs formalities). Orly-Ouest was created as a purely domestic terminal some 45 years ago and the immigration and customs zone is a crowded disaster which is bad enough to make me avoid Openskies, the (bad anyway) BA affiliate which flies the same route as La Compagnie but has always used Orly. Eventually, the distinction between Orly-Sud and Orly-Ouest will vanish as both terminals are being merged into one by construction linking the two, but work is far from over. Also, that La Compagnie is being merged into the large Leisure airline XL Airways (although they keep a distinct marketing identity) obviously makes the case for consolidating in Orly. Therefore, Lucky your concern about slots is not warranted in the long run. If La Compagnie (and we can count on the Moulin Family, owners of both La Compagnie and Galeries Lafayette for this) manages to keep a good service and image, it will have great potential and synergies with XL.

I use Orly all the time to fly between Paris and Toulouse. AF has a shuttle service “La Navette” with 30 minute frequencies throughout much of the day, where as CDG may have 3 or 4 flights. While I haven’t flown transatlantic in or out of ORY in 20 years, and am really only familiar with the shuttle pier out of the West terminal, I can say that I vastly prefer ORY to CDG. I understand the LGA comparisons but ORY is still better... at least there is public transit via rail (a 6 min airport shuttle train connects to the same RER line that goes to CDG,) and as others have noted, access to the airport by road is much better from most parts of Paris than CDG. ORY may be dumpy but it’s on par with LGA C or D (sans iPads at gates.) LGA B is still several orders of magnitude worse.

IMHO, all French airports are sub-par, so I look for a substantial discount to use any of them on trans-atlantic flights. ORY is convenient to Central Paris by car/taxi, particularly on the left bank, but totally useless on public transport with multiple connections, and a lack of lifts and escalators if you have luggage. Immigration is relatively efficient, but transfers from non-schengen locations to trans-atlantic flights often still require immigration processing in and out of France. I have only flown La Compagnie from Luton to Newark (for those unfamiliar with Luton, it is a low cost airport as close to London as Philly is to EWR). Their hard product is like business class from the 90's (better than Premium Economy, but nowhere near J class elsewhere), and their soft product isn't particularly compelling, but their sale prices are only marginally more than economy on other airlines. So if you are close to the airport, they are worth consideration. If flying from a non-Paris location, I'd be looking at Norwegian's pointy end product first.

@john they rely on local traffic and have no interline agreements. Since CDG is a skyteam hub connecting passengers are flying Air France,KLM, Delta etc. AF also flies from Orly - New York with a far superior product and they are also building a new lounge there I hear

ORY is infinitely better than CDG1 which is where La Compagnie flies into at CDG. It's a quick (20 minute cab ride) from pretty much anywhere on the left bank. While the public transport to and from ORY isn't as good as the RER to CDG, the fact that the RER goes into CDG2 and then you have to take a shuttle bus to CDG1 that adds on at least 15 minutes, plus the hassle of transferring with luggage. And then you have to deal with the dreadful "camembert". We took a chance on La Compagnie for upcoming flights to Paris despite the fact that both Newark and CDG are much more difficult to get to from our home in Brooklyn and our apartment in Paris. But the price was right ($1000 rt). When we booked there were two flights offered, we chose the later flights departing EWR at 9:30pm and ORY at 2:30pm. Wouldn't you know it but last week they cancelled both the outgoing and return flights and offered us the earlier ones. The departing flight leaves at 7:30 which his impossible for us to make that day and the return flight departs at 10:30 which means we'll need to travel at the height of rush hour to get to CDG. Needless to say, when I wrote back to them, they sort of wrote the equivalent of a Gallic shrug and said that they would refund our money if we preferred. That doesn't really help because airfares have gone up substantially since we booked those flights so we're kind of screwed. Bait and switch is the best way to describe what they did. So I don't think that they have gotten their act together and would not fly them again even if they go into ORY. BTW, we flew many times with L'Avion, the original all business class airline that was bought out by BA and became Open Skies. That was our introduction to ORY and we have since avoided CDG when we can, especially since Air France now has one flight a day from JFK to ORY.