At 0720 this morning KLM arrived back at London City from Amsterdam after an absence of eight years.
Initially KLM’s service gets off to a slow start (with only a single daily flight) but from March 26 there will be up to four flights daily.
Strictly speaking KLM does offer others flights on the LCY-Amsterdam route, but these are operated by Cityjet under a codeshare arrangement.
KLM is offering its new range of tariffs on the London City service, with the lowest prices offered to those passengers without checked luggage.
Note that Cityjet (unlike KLM) does not offer a lower hand baggage only tariff on the London City to Amsterdam route.
Says Warner Rootliep, GM for Air France/KLM in the UK and Ireland, “We’re delighted to be back in the heart of London city. The new KLM service will offer our passengers a seamless and effortless service from Central London, not only to Amsterdam but to New York, Dubai, Hong Kong and so on.”
“We know how important connectivity is to both our corporate clients and our leisure customers and we are confident that this new service will be another KLM success story.”
Why has KLM decided to re-enter the route? The Dutch airline is renowned for specialising in transfer or sixth-freedom passenger traffic. And ideally such airlines, like Emirates, Singapore Airlines or Swiss, prefer to monitor and control their own traffic flows.
A few months ago KLM returned to Dublin after a gap of 50 years (the Dublin-Amsterdam route had been codeshared with Aer Lingus), and its return to London City follows a similar pattern.
It remains unclear whether or not the Cityjet codeshare arrangement will continue in the long term.
