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LONDON (Reuters) -Air France-KLM said on Friday its 2023 bookings were almost back to pre-pandemic levels as the airline forecast higher margins in the medium term with global travel demand seeing a rebound. The airline group also reported its highest fourth-quarter revenue at 7.1 billion euros ($7.55 billion), climbing almost 50% year-on-year. “Although 2022 started quite difficult, where we still had COVID and the (Ukraine) war had started … and we had afterwards the difficulties at the airports and inflation. I’m very happy that we can say now that 2022 Q4 ended better than where we ended in Q4 2019,” Chief Financial Officer Steven Zaat said on a media call. The company said it was on track to fully pay back French state aid by April 2023, reporting a net debt of 6.3 billion euros, down 1.9 billion euros from the previous year. Zaat, however, said staffing shortages at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport may not be resolved before end-June. The warning came as the carrier said disruption at Schiphol had cost its Dutch KLM business 170 million euros in lost revenue last year.
“It is improving so that it’s very good to see. Of course, we are still impacted by the fact that there’s labor shortages everywhere, but also at the airport … but we see that gradually operations are actually back on track,” Zaat said.
Air France-KLM CEO Ben Smith also warned that European airlines would have to go head-to-head with Chinese carriers, which are still able to fly over Russian airspace.
“Between Paris and Seoul, it can add up to three hours in flight time,” Smith told the Financial Times. “If you’ve got a Chinese carrier that is flying over Russia, they’ve got an unfair advantage over us.”
($1 = 0.9403 euros)
