Ferry offer, new flights, major rail strike: 5 France travel updates

This week in travel news we have covered the roadblocks caused by the French farmers’ protest, the lack of snow affecting ski resorts and the rising price of motorway tolls. Below we look at other changes related to travel and France.

Air travel updates

Low cost airlines concentrate flights at regional airports

Air France announced its withdrawal from regional airports in 2021 in order to concentrate its flights at Paris Charles de Gaulle, leaving low cost airlines to fill the void.

Easyjet, Ryanair, Transavia and Volotea have taken up the challenge and all will offer new international flights from regional airports in 2024.

Easyjet is opening routes from:

• Bordeaux to Athens (from April 4) and Funchal (Portugal) (April 6)
• Lyon Saint-Exupéry to Alicante (May 4) and Madrid (March 31)
• Lille to Alicante (May 1)
• Marseille to Glasgow (June 26)
• Montpellier to Palma (April 1)
• Nice to Alicante (May 5), Malaga (June 2) and Cephalonia, (Greece) (June 30)
• Nantes to Alicante (April 1), Malaga (June 3) and Larnaca (Cyprus) (June 30)
• Toulouse to Berlin (March 31), Milan (April 1) and Zadar, (Croatia) (June 26)
• Paris Charles de Gaulle to Ibiza (June 29)

Ryanair is opening routes from:

• La Rochelle to Cork (June 2) and Marrakesh (June 4)
• Paris Beauvais to Trieste, (Italy) (April 3) and Dubrovnik, (Croatia) (April 5)
• Bergerac to Edinburgh (April 2)

Transavia is opening routes from:

• Orly to Milan, Comiso (Sicile) and Varna (Bulgaria) (April 2)
• Marseille to Biarritz (April 12), Palermo (Sicily) (April 19), Heraklion, Greece (July 7), Antalya (Turkey) (April 22) and Stockholm (June 6)
• Lyon to Fes, Tirana (Albania) and Yerevan (Armenia) (April 12)
• Montpellier to Heraklion (April 22)
• Nantes to Kos (Greece) (April 15)

Volotea is opening routes from:

• Brest to Olbia (Sardinia), Malaga, Rome and Minorca
• Bordeaux to Palermo (Sicily) (April 12) and Verona (April 13)
• Lyon to Porto (April 12) and Kalamata (April 17)
• Lille to Dubrovnik (April 24)
• Montpellier to Minorca, Spain (May 31)

Boost for low cost flights between France and US

PLAY, the Icelandic low-cost airline, is offering stopovers in Iceland for no additional cost on its flights from European airports, including Paris, and North America.

All flights by PLAY involve a stopover at its hub in Reykjavik, however passengers on indirect flights between Europe and North America would previously have had to book a stopover in order to have time to visit Iceland.

PLAY flies from Paris to Reykjavik, and from there to Baltimore, Boston, New York and Washington DC in the United States and to Toronto in Canada.

Read more: Boost for France-Canada flights with new all-year service confirmed

Ferry travel updates

P&O offers discount on trips to France

P&O is offering 20% off its ‘long breaks’ to France booked before February 29. A ‘long break’ is considered a booking with more than five days between the outward and return sailings.

The offer, which is valid for the Dover to Calais route, can be used to book trips until December 15, 2024 for up to nine passengers, with no limits on the amount of luggage.

It excludes foot passengers, caravans, minibuses and motorhomes.

P&O recently entered into another spat with Eurostar after the train company blamed its poor financial results for the fourth quarter of 2023 on “increased competition from ferry companies deviating from the social models applicable in British and French domestic shipping”.

This was a clear reference to P&O notoriously sacking 800 staff in 2022. Unions claim that the workers hired to replace these staff are paid as little as £4 an hour by a P&O third-party contractor.

“Unlike Eurotunnel’s monopoly, P&O Ferries operates in a highly competitive market,” a P&O spokesman told The Times on January 26.

Train travel updates

10,000 more seats made available on TGVs to Brittany

TGVs between Paris and Brittany are to be reorganised from April to allow for up to 10,000 more seats each weekend, the SNCF has announced.

Passenger numbers have risen by 10% on the route over the past year, meaning that many TGVs are fully booked,

To cater for the increase, the SNCF will use double decker TGVs on the Brittany routes each weekend. This will allow for 2,000 more places between Paris and Rennes, 2,000 to Saint-Malo, 2,000 to Brest and 4,000 to Quimper.

SNCF ticket inspectors plan to strike from February 15

A major rail workers union has announced its plans to strike between February 15 and 19, which might disrupt travel during the half-term holidays.

The strike planned by SUD-Rail is related to the renegotiation of bonus pay and wage increases for ticket inspectors, which were less than the 4.6% promised by the SNCF in 2022.

That year, a strike by the SUD-Rail union over Christmas disrupted the travel plans of around 200,000 people.

Read more: France rail strikes: unions have until midday to respond to SNCF offer

While the union has announced its plans to strike, which would have a significant effect on holiday traffic - particularly during the busy weekend of February 17 - this could yet be called off if negotiations with the SNCF are successful.

Note that SUD-Rail is a national union: Its name is an acronym for Solidaire, unitaire et démocratique.