Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our Investor Day today. My name is Olivier Gall, I am Head of Investor Relations for Air France-KLM Group. It is a great pleasure to see all of you in this meeting room today. Thanks for your interest. This event is also webcast, I would like to give a warm welcome to those of you following us via the web. We held our last Investor Day almost three years ago, a lot of things happened in our group since that time. Today's Investor Day will be the opportunity for management team to set out the group strategic priorities and the financial trajectory to 2024. Benjamin Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Air France-KLM, will start with our strategic plan and strategic priorities.
He will be followed by Pieter Elbers, Chief Executive Officer of KLM, and Anne Rigail, Chief Executive Officer of Air France, will give you more insight of the implication in the airlines. Finally, Frédéric Gagey, Chief Financial Officer, will conclude with the group financial outlook and the financial implications for the years to come. The entire CEO committee will then be happy to answer your questions, and we will then invite you to spend more time with us and pursue the exchange around the buffet lunch. Last, the technical information for those of you who took headphones. The translation is provided from English to French on channel 1. On time performance being a major focus for us, let's start without any further delay, and join me welcoming Mr. Benjamin Smith, CEO of Air France-KLM, to the stage. Ben, the floor is yours.
Okay. Merci, Olivier. Bonjour. Welcome to our Investor Day. Welcome to our Investor Day here in Paris. It's great to see some familiar faces around the room. As Olivier just said, we have an agenda. I'll start, followed by Pieter, Anne, and then Frédéric. We'll try to stay on time, to ensure that we leave plenty of opportunity for all of you to ask whatever questions that you may have. I'm going to start out here, with a very important message to our team, the team that I work with day in, day out, and those are the employees of Air France-KLM and Transavia. The amount of work that I see day in, day out, the dedication, the passion that I've witnessed since I arrived here 13 months ago is really very impressive.
Those of you that may fly on our aircraft, take our flights, go through our airports, I'm sure you've noticed that the level of pride at our three brands is second to none. I just want to start out here by thanking all Air France Group employees. It is a pleasure to work with them. There are a few up on the top here, just at the back of the theater here, and there were a few when we came in. Also, which this is something I don't think we say often enough, is me personally, all of the senior management staff, truly believe that our staff are the number one asset of this group. We are in the customer service business. I think you all know that. Our business revolves around our customers.
Every day, we look to meet and exceed the expectations of our customers at each touch point. Be it when customers are shopping on the web, checking in on our apps, making changes to their reservations, checking in at the airport, checking a bag, boarding the airplane, all the different steps, all the different touch points that our customers come across when they are interacting with our brands. Our goal is to ensure that we meet and exceed those expectations. A lot of the investments that we're making currently, and we plan to make going forward, are to ensure that against our competition, we are able to do this in a much more powerful and consistent way. The new value focus model that we are working on, is focused on four main pillars, starting out with employees.
We want to ensure that we are the best place to work across all brands. We're going to monitor this through our employee promoter score, which we do every day. In terms of customers, we do follow very closely our NPS, our net promoter scores, and as I said, exceeding and meeting our customer expectations front and center. With those two items, those two pillars, being successful in those two pillars, this will drive new incremental shareholder value. We're looking for obviously strong improvements in the operating margin of our group, and we want to reach and we believe we can reach top financial performance in this sector, always looking and ensuring that our commitment to global environmental sustainability is also front and center. Therefore, it's obvious that Air France-KLM needs to reinvent in order to be successful.
We started to build a new value-focused model around five pillars. Optimize our current operating model, reducing operating cost and increasing efficiency, taking full advantage of group sales. Grow profitable passenger revenue, leveraging hubs, focusing growth on the most profitable segments of our group assets. Making sure that each of our brands come to life. Leverage European consolidation as an opportunity for our group, but only when it makes sense financially and strategically. Beyond our passenger business, we have many other parts of our business, customer data, Flying Blue, cargo, engineering, maintenance, which have a lot of opportunity to grow from a profit perspective.
Of course, delivering everything that we do in a sustainable way, keeping and strengthening our leadership position as the airline group most committed to global environmental sustainability, I'm not sure you're aware of this, as evidenced by our first position ranking on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. Here, the new value focus model will be progressively deployed over the coming years. As we put in place the necessary foundation in order to reach our goals, that work will take part in the first few years of this journey. The more and more these operational and these foundational elements are put in place, the opportunity to grow our profitable passenger revenue business will come into play. Always looking out for opportunities to leverage within the European market and always looking to develop our customer data, Flying Blue, cargo, and engineering and maintenance business.
Just going back to the top here, every single step, everything we do, commitment to global environmental sustainability is front and center. A lot of people ask us, how does this come into play in our group? Our employees are, I would say, the group, the stakeholder that push us to ensure that our responsibilities are taken seriously. Our employees want to make sure they're working in an industry that they can be proud of, one that they can speak to their friends, to their family, and be secure that this is an industry that is responsible and that they have the number one ideas. It's amazing how many ideas we get from our 85,000 employees about what we can do as a brand in order to remain sustainable in a long-term way and in an innovative way. We have amazing assets.
I think you're well aware of this. Three very powerful brands. They all complement each other. KLM, based in Amsterdam, Air France, here in Paris. We have two operating units for Transavia, one based in the Netherlands and one based here in France. Throughout the group, we have 85,000 employees total, all very professional and engaged, as I mentioned earlier. We have two complementary hubs, two complementary global hubs, one in Amsterdam, one at Roissy here in Paris. We also have a very strong position at Orly Airport here in Paris as well, which is severely slot constrained. We have over 50% of the slots there, which is a huge asset. We have very powerful partnerships, well demonstrated by our strong joint venture across the Atlantic with our partner, Delta, as well as our new partner, Virgin Atlantic. We have some very unique competitive advantages.
France is the number one inbound destination in the world. The number one inbound destination in the world. This is ahead of many other countries that even I, when I read this fact, I was surprised that France was ahead of many other countries that I would have expected to be in first position, including the U.S. Schiphol, best-in-class European hub. Schiphol pioneered the international transit model over 50 years ago, with the full alignment of the Dutch government, Schiphol Airport, and KLM. This model has been replicated, duplicated around the world. Singapore Airlines was the first airline that duplicated this, followed by many other cities and many other airlines. You can see one city, one airline that has taken this model and brought it up a level with a lot of subsidies. This is Emirates in Dubai.
We have a lot of joint teams that have been in place since the fusion of the two carriers in 2003. One that really drives a competitive advantage are the commercial teams we have both in Amsterdam and Paris that ensure that the revenue production and quality that we have is as strong as possible. Okay. Here, a lot of work in the last year around simplifying our brands. If you go back to this time last year, we had five brands within the group, Air France, KLM, Joon, Hop, and Transavia. We've moved forward to focus around three master brands, ensuring that customers are clear about what is the value proposition of each one of these brands. Air France serves to showcase the best of France around the world.
France is one of a handful of countries which has its own unique brand and draws in people from around the world. Air France's goal is to be able to leverage this as it flies the French flag around the world. The KLM brand is very powerful as well. We recently celebrated its 100th birthday. KLM is the oldest airline brand in the world. This global brand focuses on its strong Dutch identity with a history of innovation, and we want to maintain the allure of KLM for the next generation of travelers. Transavia is our low-cost brand, both in France and the Netherlands, and with our recently signed new agreement with the pilots at Air France, we now have an unbelievable opportunity to grow this brand in France.
Our three airline brands have clear roadmaps to support the execution of the group strategy in years to come. KLM will continue to develop its successful business model, further growing as the best connection carrier to and from Europe. KLM will continuously focus on cost and operational excellence, and leverage and evolve its global brand strength to remain first in customer choice. Air France, we have a lot of work to do here at Air France. We'll launch a strong transformation to fix its current broken model and increase its profitability by increasing operational efficiency, simplifying many of the complex processes that are currently in place, and pivoting towards the most profitable flows in order to extract maximum value from the Paris market. As I said, right from the beginning as well, meeting and exceeding customer expectations every step of the way.
Transavia, very powerful tool to address the price-sensitive segment with an extremely efficient low-cost base. As I said, we have a long-standing base in Amsterdam, and enormous new flexibility to grow the operation at Paris Orly and any other of the major French cities throughout the country. Air France and Transavia, we also have a major profitability issue at Paris Orly, as well as the French domestic market, Transavia will help us better optimize our portfolio at Orly. Let's start out here, just going into a little bit of further detail on KLM, and Pieter will go into further detail when he presents right after me. Since 2014, a great number of initiatives have been put in place, showing extremely strong results. A high-performance organization was put in place in 2014.
A transformation of operations with digital increased agility, network planning, and higher fleet utilization has shown big benefits. The results are quite visible in KLM. The unit cost has come down approximately 4% since 2013 and 2018, and operational efficiency has greatly improved. Going forward, effort will be focused on five pillars. Again, Pieter will go through these in more detail. Customer and product, network and fleet, operational excellence, people and organization, innovation, and sustainability. Here, we're well on our way to simplifying the fleet at KLM. You can see here today at Cityhopper, our regional arm at KLM, we have 49 aircraft in the fleet as part of the Embraer family, both the 175 and the 190. The medium-haul fleet is made up of the 737NG, 51 aircraft we have in the fleet. Three models, the 700, 800, and 900.
On the long haul, we have 5 different types of aircraft. We have the A330, 13 of those, both the 200 and 300 series. We've got 14 787s, recently taken delivery of our first -10. On the 777s, we have the 200ER as well as the 300ER. At KLM, because of the number of airplanes we have in both fleets, we're able to operate this fleet under a common pilot type rating. Air France, the balance that we have, I'll show you in a few slides. It's not the case today. We continue to have 10 747s, both the 400 Series Combi and the 400 Series all-passenger aircraft. For a total of 66 long-haul aircraft. Moving forward, we'll be adding the new Embraer 195-E2 to the fleet. These aircraft will continue to be flown as one common pilot type rating, so one cockpit.
737 fleet will evolve either to the MAX when and if we're satisfied with the performance of that aircraft and/or other aircraft that are available on the market. We're definitely targeting to ensure that it remains one cockpit type. On the wide bodies, the 747s will be exiting the fleet in the short term, and the A330 fleet will be exiting in the midterm, which will leave one common pilot type rating, one cockpit at KLM between the two aircraft types on the wide body, so the 787 and the 777. Here at Schiphol, this is both a challenge and an opportunity. First off, KLM will adapt its fleet to this slot constraint situation, delivering short-term growth through larger aircraft gauge. Showing there we have the 787-10, the Embraer E2. Second, we'll plan through KLM to optimize our revenue in this new capacity constraint environment.
Third, we'll align with external stakeholders to enable future capacity growth at Schiphol beyond the current cap of 500,000 movements after 2020 to prepare future long-term growth and create further value. KLM has built a very powerful competitive advantage at Schiphol Airport. First Amsterdam benefits from an ideal positioning to connect Northern Europe with Southern and Eastern Europe. Second, KLM has built a very powerful hub tool in Schiphol with industry-leading minimum connection times, 45 minutes, which enables fast and efficient connections on intra-Europe and medium to long-haul connections. Moving forward, KLM will have to cope with Schiphol Airport facing slot restrictions. However, the aircraft movements have reached the current cap of 500,000. We do have this opportunity to drive higher unit revenues within this new reality.
The KLM brand, one of the first airline global brands. We all know how quickly markets can change, and new entrants can disrupt previous industry leaders. We'll continue to invest in this powerful brand, which we're all very proud of, and ensure that it continues to be well-positioned for the next generation of travelers. We do have 100 years of success at KLM, and we definitely will be doing everything we can to ensure KLM lasts another 100 years. At Air France, as I said, the model that we have in place at Air France is not sustainable. It is broken. We have already started a major transformation, and we're doing this one step at a time, and we're doing this with full alignment with our social partners, so all of the staff at Air France.
When I arrived here 13 months ago, this was priority number one. How do we build and ensure we have a strong social contract in place at Air France? An enormous amount of work by many people at the Group been put in place to ensure that we have new contracts which give us the flexibility required to overhaul and transform Air France into a much more robust and competitive carrier. This was done through the first overhaul of what was a very, very tough item in 2018, which those of you that are familiar with French law, French labor law, it was a renewal of the NAO, which takes place every year. This was done in October of last year, and that formed a positive base to be able to negotiate with all of the individual teams at Air France.
The pilots, the cabin crew, and the ground staff. Happy to say that all of these agreements are now in place, which have unlocked an enormous amount of opportunity for Air France, and I'll go through some of these in detail. Anne will do the same in even greater detail in her presentation. This is all being done in a step-by-step manner. Every step of the way, we're ensuring we get full alignment with our social partners. Everybody understands the opportunity, that the balance and benefit of each change is well understood, and we don't move forward until we're comfortable. Step by step. We do have very challenging facilities to operate from, in particular here at Roissy.
Throughout all this effort the last year, there has been a big focus on operational robustness, Anne will show some details and some metrics on how we can show you how that's taken place. Those of you that fly Air France in and out of Roissy, I hope you're seeing some improvement in the on-time performance, as well as if you check bags and make connections in those two areas as well. As I said, the cost transformation program is well underway with a lot more work to be done there. How we move forward with the employees and our partnerships, definitely everything is being done on a win-win basis. We started this out last year by really pushing four key pillars: trust, respect, transparency, and confidentiality.
They sound very straightforward, but we have basically started every single discussion that we've had with all of the unions, all of our employees at Air France, with these four pillars. These were four pillars that had to be accepted and had to be signed off by everybody at each one of these negotiations before we would move forward. Confidentiality was a key element of this. When I arrived, many of the things that were going on at Air France, information that should have been kept inside of the group was being read in the newspapers. Our staff, in many instances, were getting their information from newspapers. Confidentiality was key so that we could have the necessary discussions to reach agreements on how we could evolve the Air France business. Transparency.
There was a zero trust when I arrived with many of the teams at Air France that had to be regained and earned in a respectful way. By sharing as much information as possible in a confidential way, we were able to move very quickly on this front. One of the key examples of success that has come about the agreement with our pilots, which is not well known or known at all, I think, outside of Air France, has been the evolution of what we call a production balance agreement, which there are several production balance agreements within the group. The one between the Air France pilots and Air France, the company, has been extremely restrictive. It's based on three metrics, capacity from an ASK perspective.
I think you all know what an ASK is, the number of passengers on an airplane times the distance. Number of block hours, all the flight hours that are flown long-haul by Air France, and the number of long-haul aircraft. Number of aircraft, number of hours. Pilots care about how many hours airlines have because that drives jobs. The capacity. It makes sense when you're comparing block hours and number of aircraft between airlines. The ASK metric really has been holding Air France back from optimally deciding which aircraft to buy and how to configure them on the inside. This KPI has forced Air France to make really punitive fleet and production decisions. An example. Just start it here with an example.
If you take a Paris-Singapore or an Amsterdam-Singapore flight using the same aircraft type, so a 777-300ER, same block time, maybe give or take a few minutes. The configuration that we use on KLM, 408 seats on the aircraft, versus the 296 seat configuration we use at Air France with the larger business cabin and a first class La Première cabin. You can see here on an ASK basis, Air France is running 35% less ASKs than KLM. In the previous production balance in place at Air France, Air France would be on side in terms of block hours, on side number of aircraft, same number of aircraft here. Takes about 1.25 aircraft to operate that route. In terms of the capacity, off side.
To maintain being on side on that metric, either have to configure the airplanes in a way that are not optimal for the Paris market or buy aircraft such as the A380, that may drive larger ASKs to balance it out. Not optimal. What we've been able to achieve, and this flexibility has solidified what pilots really care about, which is the number of hours, and the size of aircraft that drives their pay. The ASK metric has been replaced by a new KPI, which is based on maximum seating capacity of an aircraft. With the certified maximum capacity of a 777 is 500 seats, as an example, it doesn't matter now whether we configure Air France with 296 seats or 408 seats.
From this angle now, from the production balance agreement, we've now evolved this to something much more flexible. This is a huge win from a revenue quality, from really designing the interiors to be optimal for the unique Paris market. This was necessary. The agreement that we now have in place, the new agreement we have in place with the Air France pilots, also has lifted the restriction on the number of airplane that can be operated by Transavia France. Transavia France. Transavia France is the newer arm of Transavia. The brand was created and started in the Netherlands. When it started here in France, going from zero to 14 airplanes, that was the first set of numbers that could be introduced. Major strike at Air France. When Transavia was positioned to grow to 40 airplanes, another major strike.
A huge win to be able to completely lift this cap on a win-win basis with our pilots. We now have absolutely zero limit on the number of aircraft that Transavia France can operate. This tool, which is very cost effective against the low-cost competitors here in Europe, we now have the opportunity to use this tool both defensively and offensively, with whatever number of airplanes we want to use. Here, another example of how the previous very constrained production balance rule, what it did to decisions. If you look here in 2014, before some of the new seats were put on some of our 777s, we had between 59 and 77 premium seats. Both La Première and business class.
When the reconfiguration on this aircraft type, a 777-200ER, was done, in order to comply with the production balance, ensure that we were on side, had to reduce the number of premium seats down to 52 to 64 to ensure that, as I said, the ASK metric was made. Because in the previous one, didn't matter, a seat was a seat, even though a business class seat was producing more revenue. From a pure pilot agreement perspective, they were treated the same. How that has negatively impacted Air France, we can see here on the right, the long haul premium capacity in Paris has grown by 9% since 2014. There's been a big increase in long haul premium capacity in Paris. You can see here, in large part because of these types of restrictive agreements, the Air France long haul premium capacity has gone down 4%.
The model of Air France is positioned to gain as much of this traffic as possible, and this is just one example of the restrictions that were in place where we could not position the carrier as best as possible. Oops. Just go back one slide, please. Okay, here. If you thought we had a complex fleet at KLM, moving to a more simplified, you can see what we have at Air France. We don't have every type of airplane, but we almost do. If you start out with the regional fleet here, so operated by Hop!. First off, we've done the rebranding to ensure from a customer perspective, that it's the Air France mother brand that comes first. We've already made the decision to exit the ATRs. That fleet has been shrinking quite rapidly. They should be out in the short term.
We'll be exiting the Embraer 145s. We will concentrate the Hop! fleet with the CRJ1000s and the Embraer 190s. We are evaluating whether we keep the CRJ700s and the Embraer 170s as well. If we can come up with a cost structure and a route network where those airplanes can make sense, we'll keep those airplanes in the fleet. Either way, we'll go down from four cockpits to two cockpits at Air France Hop. On the medium haul side of the Air France business, today we have a unified Airbus medium haul fleet with four different variants. The 318, 319, 320, 321. Air France is the only airline in the world that operates all four of the aircraft types. Some of them are bulk loaded, some of them are containerized. Even though it's one aircraft type, it is complex.
It is one pilot cockpit, as I said. You move down to the long haul, we have A330-200s, A340-300s, A350-900s. We got the first aircraft in. We just received the second 787-9s. We have nine in the fleet. There's one more that will be delivered as part of the firm order. On the 777 side, we have 70 aircraft in the fleet. Two of them are in an all-cargo configuration and 68 on the passenger side. Both the 200 ER and the 300 ER. Then, of course, we have 10 A380s. We've already announced we will be removing the A380s from the fleet. Those 380s will be out of the Air France fleet by 2022. The A340-300s will also be exiting the fleet in the short term. If you move forward, we will be centering the fleet around two cockpits.
The A330-200, A350-900, and depending on market availability, market demands, and the environment, we will balance those two fleets out, and we'll retire the A330-200s when it makes sense. In the interim, we have a lot of efficiencies because those two fleets can be operated under a common pilot type rating. On the wide body side, we have, as I said, 10 787-9s in the short term, and we still have a very large fleet of 777s. The A350-900 and 787, a lot of people ask us, does it make sense to operate both of those aircraft types? Especially if one of the fleet 787s are only at 10 aircraft. We have a lot of flexibility here. We can look to move those aircraft to KLM in the future.
Three of those aircraft are on leases, we could also look to put those out in the market if we want to exit them from the Air France fleet. Right now, we are assuming they stay in the Air France fleet so that we have good leverage when we negotiate with Airbus and Boeing on the replacement of the Airbus A330-200s and some of the early model 777s that we can continue to have the choice of flying either, sort of selecting either Airbus or Boeing. We do not want to have more than 2 pilot type cockpits in the Air France long haul fleet. That'll bring down the number of cockpits at Air France from nine today and in a fully optimized fleet down to five.
Huge simplification here, helps our operation manage the fleet, helps our check-in agents and our day of operation when we have to swap airplanes for the configurations, and of course, really helps out our maintenance teams, with fewer aircraft types, fewer engine types. The decision to replace the A380s and to exit these airplanes sooner rather than later was a very, very tough decision. Took a lot of analysis, and a lot of involvement by many teams at Air France. Even though it's only 10 airplanes in the Air France fleet, they drive a lot of decisions and a lot of the makeup of the operation. A lot of the bank structures at Roissy are designed around the arrival and departure of the flights that are operated by A380s because they're so big, and they cannot depend on a large portion of local market.
This aircraft type is the benchmark, is what drives the rest of the Air France fleet. Making the decision to pull these aircraft does give us more flexibility because we are going to replace them with smaller aircraft types with additional frequencies to further smooth out what's already a complex operation at Roissy. Today in the morning, for those of you that arrive on international flights into Charles de Gaulle Roissy, we land, or we have 60 to 70 wide body airplanes arriving in a two-and-a-half-hour period, which puts an enormous stress on the facility, even on a good weather day. A lot of that, as I said, is driven by the need to have a strong hub in the morning for these A380s. There are three airlines that operate the A380s in Europe, British Airways, Lufthansa, and Air France.
British Airways and Lufthansa have already renovated their interiors to ensure that they have competitive configurations, competitive products on the inside of those airplanes. Air France has not done that as of today. We were at a point where we had to make a decision. Are we going to invest the necessary EUR 35 million-EUR 40 million to bring the interiors of these aircraft up to competitive standard? Today, they have a very old La Première cabin. We have business class seats that are not lie flat. We don't have the latest in flight entertainment, and these aircraft are flying on the most lucrative and high-profile routes in the Air France network. JFK, Los Angeles, San Francisco. To not have our best product and our key routes is really a discount to the brand and really holds us back from showcasing the best of Air France.
This fleet is the poorest operating aircraft in the fleet. We have enormous amounts of delays on this aircraft. This fleet has the highest rate of cancellations. Getting these airplanes out sooner rather than later is going to help the operations at Air France. As I said, the airplane is very big. It gives us much more flexibility. On these new routes, or on these bellwether routes where we operate them, more frequencies with the right product on board are a big plus and advantage for our customers. As you know, Airbus has also decided to discontinue the manufacture of this aircraft type, so putting into doubt the availability of parts both directly from Airbus and the supply chain. This is a good time to buy long-haul airplanes. The market for long-haul airplanes is down. It's weak right now.
The timing for Air France, I don't think, could be better. We can get some true opportunistic prices for the aircraft we select to replace the A380. The choice will either be the 787 or the A350, and we're hoping to make that decision in the coming weeks. Here, just an example of the airplanes that have already been selected coming into the fleet. As you know, we placed a big landmark order for 60 Airbus A220-300s to replace the first half of our medium-haul fleet at Air France. As you saw on the previous slide, we have A318s, 19s, 20s, 21s. These 60 aircraft will replace the A318s and A319s. They're going to drive an approximate 1.3 million EBITDA increase per aircraft, so EUR 1.3 million. That'll total, with these 60 aircraft, EUR 75 million.
If Airbus decides to build a Series 500, a larger model, or 400, whatever they decide to call it, we will be very interested in that airplane to replace some of our larger Airbus narrow-body aircraft, such as the A320 or the A321. Of course, we could look to the A320neo for the second half of the replacement of our narrow bodies. We could look at whatever other aircraft is on the market. This airplane we're very excited about. It's a brand-new airframe, brand-new wing. The engines, of course, have had a few early issues, but this is not unlike many of the other engines that are coming into market.
We are really, really excited about the cost of operating these airplanes, the comfort that they have on board for customers, and the ability for us to use them much more profitably on all of our domestic and intra-European flying. On the wide-body side, we have 28 airplanes, either in service or on order. Our calculations show a EUR 12.5 million improvement in EBITDA for each one, split between the lower fuel burn and an optimized cabin, and that should drive an approximate EUR 350 million improvement once we have all 28 aircraft in the fleet. Here, another very important slide. If you look today, this is the interior layout, LOPA. Just for illustrative purposes, we're showing you the 787-9 at Air France. Today, we have 276 seats on board that airplane. We have 30 seats in the business class, so up there on the left.
We've got 21 in Premium Economy, and we have 225 in Economy, so a total of 276 seats. If you look at the industry-leading configuration, so keeping constant the number of Business Class seats with the same type of Business Class seat, same with Premium Economy, by ensuring that the galleys are optimized, the toilets are in the best location, we've been able to have this as an opportunity now with the new cabin crew agreement that has been put in place with Air France. We can drive 9% more efficiency just with cabin configuration. We can add more Business Class seats, add more Premium Economy Class seats. If we want to choose the same ratio between Premium Economy, we could do that as well. 9% more efficient just on the layout of the airplane. Same thing here.
Air France, for a number of reasons, we do not have optimal utilization of both the medium-haul fleet and the long-haul fleet. You can see here within our group, we have a big difference between KLM and Air France in terms of utilization. Obviously, the cost of the airplane spread out over more hours and more seats does bring down the ownership cost up to 10%-20%. Why is the Air France utilization, let's say, on the wide-body fleet, lower than at KLM? All the work that's been done by Pieter and the team at KLM to ensure that the schedules have been optimized around driving utilization up have produced some huge benefits. Having a complex fleet has made it more difficult for Air France to do so. Many of the schedules that Air France operates, we're looking to change.
We have airplanes that sit around the world on the Air France side of the business, in Johannesburg, in São Paulo, in Santiago, in Singapore, in Hong Kong, all these different areas where we fly ultimate optimal timing. Those of you that fly on some of those routes, we fly overnight in both directions, and we leave the airplane there all day. Some of the routes, we need to do that for competitive reasons, but numerous other routes, we don't need to do that. Just by bringing the airplane back and having it available to fly something else, that will boost the utilization rate at Air France on the wide-body side.
On the narrow-body side, because of the non-optimal setup we've had with Hop and with Transavia, to be able to ensure that we hold on to our slot portfolio at Orly, we have to make a lot of non-optimal decisions on what time the Air France narrow-body fleet is operating. This, with the new flexibility that we have, with the ability to grow Transavia and ensure we have the right product at the right time, gives us flexibility that should drive that number higher. We have something else which I get asked many times, what are our views in terms of low-cost, long-haul? We're still not convinced that this is a model that has a strong future. However, we do have a position today that enables us to maintain a strong market share on the big leisure markets in and out of Paris.
The largest market in and out of Paris today is New York, but you'd be surprised at what number 2, 3 and 4 are. Number 2 is Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe. Number 3 is La Réunion just around the southern part of Africa, and the third is Fort-de-France in Martinique. We have numerous low-cost carriers on those routes. A decision was made a few years ago to densify 12 of the 43 777-300ERs into an extremely dense configuration to compete with the carriers on those routes. You can see, as a benchmark today, an A330-200 from one of our competitors has 314 seats with a non-lie-flat seat in Premium Economy, so basically not a business class, but a Premium Economy class, and is driving a unit cost of approximately $0.05.
The Air France high density 777, the 12 aircraft that we have that are focused on those three high volume leisure markets, the CASK can go down to $0.05 as well. The RASK opportunity for Air France is higher because of the opportunity to carry our existing customers that fly Air France for business reasons and may have more of a tendency to fly Air France for a leisure trip. The Airbus A350-900 and 1000 are starting to enter the fleet to some of our leisure competitors. That will bring down the unit cost for those airlines by approximately $0.01. Here we have to make a decision. Does Air France maintain the current offering, or do we look to do something else?
Our current strategy is to maintain what we have, and based on what we've seen, XL, with a lot of business here in France, Aigle Azur, we believe that the strength of the long haul, low-cost carriers in France is not that strong, and we do have a product that can keep us in that market for now. This is very important for the group. Operating an airline in France is not easy. We continue to lobby very strong for a more competitive environment for airlines here in France. These are a few examples of what we're up against operating in this country.
The difference in costs to operate, if you compare between Paris Charles de Gaulle and Schiphol, it costs us €300 million more to operate here in France and the facilities that are not as efficient and not as modern, and we cannot get the same minimum connection times here in Paris as we can in Amsterdam. That's a high cost to pay to operate here in Paris. There are other specific French taxes only focused on the airline industry. There is a civil aviation tax of EUR 108 million. There's a solidarity tax that's imposed on airlines that for Air France costs EUR 62 million. There is an eco contribution tax, a new one starting in 2020, which will cost us EUR 60 million.
We'll be contributing in the form of a tax of EUR 20 million to the new CDG Express, which should start in 2024 or 2025. There are other unique taxes focused on or targeting the aviation market here in France. Of course, France has the highest social taxation in Europe, which the 50,000 employees that we have based here in France, the group is responsible for those. Ahead of Italy, ahead of Germany, ahead of the U.K., and of course, ahead of the Netherlands. Moving on here to Transavia. I guess on the Dutch side of the brand, so the operation we have in Holland, we will remain the number 1 low-cost carrier in the Netherlands. We'll invest where necessary and where it makes sense. We do obviously have slot-constrained airports. There is the possibility of opportunities at Lelystad Airport.
On the French side, as I mentioned earlier, we do now have an incredible amount of opportunity and flexibility with the new pilot agreement that we have in place. Both to grow in the VFR markets, the leisure markets, as well as the mixed markets that we compete against, Vueling, EasyJet, Ryanair, Volotea, and the other carriers that have those lower cost models. Here, we're just announcing today, later on this afternoon, that we're going to open a new base in Montpellier, two aircraft. That'll start in April 2020. In the room here, we have Nathalie Stubler, who won't be presenting today, but she is the CEO of Transavia France, so you can ask her all about that later on during the break. We also are going to be strengthening the base that we have for Transavia France in Nantes.
We'll be adding another two aircraft in 2019. Right now we have one common cockpit across both operations, and we're using the 737NG. We have the 800 model in both operations, and we also have the 700 model in service in the Netherlands. This fleet will grow, obviously, with the new flexibility that we have in France. We're evaluating where we can grow, what makes most sense, both strategically and economically, and how do we balance that out with the opportunities we have at KLM and Air France. We're really excited about this, to grow from the maximum capacity of 40 airplanes up to whatever number we want, being able to balance out Orly, being able to develop a much stronger position in secondary markets in France, where today we have a very limited position.
Bordeaux, Nantes, Toulouse, Marseille, Nice, Lyon, these are all important markets to Air France. Up until now, we had limited tools to be able to address all segments, all sectors of the market. I'll just move on here to what we have in place at the group. As you see, we've gone through KLM, gone through Air France, gone through Transavia. Each one of these business units contribute an enormous amount of value to the group. The commercial side of the business, the IT side of the business, the cargo side of the business, we have enormous efficiencies in place, and we're going to continue to drive further efficiencies on these fronts. Commercial distribution and alliances. IT efficiency is extremely strong. I'll go through engineering and maintenance and cargo in just a few slides here.
Moving forward, we want to put additional focus in these areas, fleet and network. We already do spend some time coordinating fleet purchases between the three brands. We believe we can do an even better job on that front. The networks, we do have good coordination between our major airlines, our brands today. As an example, some of our destinations where we don't fly daily with, let's say, KLM or Air France, we try to ensure that the non-daily flights are complementary. San Jose is a good example, where we fly four times a week with Air France, three times a week with KLM, that we operate on consecutive days so that customers have a choice of one of our hubs to be able to get there on a daily basis. Commercial and alliances, this will be strengthened.
Human resources, we have now a new head of human resources at the group level, Janet Dekker. She's here in the second row. This position was vacant when I arrived here. We want to ensure that our talent can flow across the group, because today it's a little cumbersome to move somebody from the Netherlands to France for all kinds of reasons and vice versa. This is one example of something that we believe we've got some opportunity for improvement and for value. Purchasing and procurement, a lot of this is done already on a group basis, we believe we can get more value out of this. With the growing importance of customer data as well as digital, this will take on a stronger role at the group level. Here, now moving on to the revenue side of the business.
All these foundation and items that I've just described, a lot of the changes that have gone on with the union contracts that have evolved, we're going to show you what we want to do with that moving forward to produce more revenue and more profit. Over many years, Air France and KLM have built up fantastic hubs both in Amsterdam and in Paris, and they compete and are of similar size or even greater size than the two other main hubs in Europe, both at Heathrow and at Frankfurt. Today in Amsterdam, KLM, we link 171 global destinations, operating 347 flights a day. In Paris, at both airports, if you combine the two of them, Roissy-Charles de Gaulle and Orly, we serve 194 destinations around the world and 444 frequencies per day.
You can see how that compares with British Airways at London and Lufthansa at Frankfurt. The dual hub model is really powerful when you put the two together. This slide is extremely important. This is probably one of the most important ones that I'll show you today. If you see here the description or the box on the left-hand side, it shows the current strengths of each of the segments that we fly at both airlines. Starting with KLM, we are profitable on the majority, if not almost all, of the segments that are in the KLM portfolio. On a local basis, so customers starting or ending their trips in Amsterdam, both medium-haul and long-haul, premium and economy, we are profitable. Customers connecting over medium-haul, premium, we are profitable.
If you're going, let's say, from Dublin via Amsterdam to Milan, we're profitable on those premium connections. Medium-haul, we do have trouble at KLM in the economy cabin on the connection basis. On a local basis, we're okay. If you look at the long-haul network, we're profitable at KLM, all 4 of these segment types. A very strong base to grow from. Of course, there's nothing in domestic because we don't operate a domestic market in the Netherlands. If you move over here on the Air France side, the biggest money-losing part of the business is the domestic economy market, economy segment, where we lose approximately EUR 180 million a year. This will be addressed through the optimization of Orly. This is the center of the domestic market. Economy class is a major focus for us in France.
If you're flying premium out of a domestic city, let's say Toulouse to Paris to Tokyo, in business class, we do make money on those types of routes. The one area in the domestic market where we are profitable, it's on a connection basis in the premium cabin. Medium-haul, you can see we lose money on a local basis in and out of Paris. We lose money on flights that flow over Paris. We do make money, however, on a local basis on the European and short haul into and out of Paris, and on a connection basis within Europe, we're okay there as well. Long haul, you can see here we do well, all 3 of the segment types.
However, in the economy cabin, when we connect long-haul customers, so let's say from San Francisco via Paris to Bangalore, as an example, here, we do not make any money. If you look at the old model, so that example, we go back to the evolution of the production balance that was in place at Air France. One of the benefits of the evolution of that deal shows that we can move our exposure from the areas where Air France does not make money and ensure that we have as much exposure as possible to the markets and to the segment flows where we do make money on the Air France side of the business. We do have the Paris market, which we underperform in, which, as I said, is the number one inbound tourist market in the world. It is a very large premium market as well.
By redesigning the ALLY strategy, if you look at those from a revenue quality perspective and a profitability perspective, all of the restrictions that we had in place from a pilot and a cabin crew perspective have been cleaned up, have been severely or extremely reduced in terms of flexibility. As an example, so here, as I said, France is the number one inbound market. You can see ahead of Spain, ahead of the United States, ahead of Italy, and ahead of the United Kingdom, and it's highly concentrated around Paris. So you can see it's eight times larger than the next inbound city, which is Nice. And then if you look forward for 2020, France is targeting 100 million foreign tourists.
The market is expanding. This slide is also very important. You can see here we've divided into 3 different types of airlines. If you start with the left, these are strong connecting airlines. Delta Air Lines, our partner, has the largest hub in the world at Atlanta, which is the busiest airport in the world from a small population base. The city of Atlanta is relatively smaller or much smaller than Paris. It drives a lot of connections, a lot of domestic connections, a lot of international connections. As you know, Delta is the most profitable airline in the world, and they've positioned their hub in Atlanta around where they have their strengths. Lufthansa, same thing. Frankfurt is not as large of a home market as Paris, and they've optimized around this kind of split, 32% local, 68% of their capacity is focused on transfer traffic.
Emirates, also a similar split. What we have within the group, we have an optimized split of 40%/60%, and works very well in Amsterdam. As you saw, the profitability that's driven from those types of flows and segments produce this split. If you look in the middle here, we have airlines that are benefiting from mixed local and connection traffic flows. Cathay Pacific, Turkish Airlines, and Air France. The market in Paris is so large. Our study showed that we are not optimal operating 49% connections versus 51% local. Why haven't we been able to change this? Numerous reasons, in particular, the restrictive pilot agreement that was in place. We hear from many people, why is it that Air France put out a 2% increase in wages last year and 2% this year?
It pales in comparison to the opportunities that we have on the revenue production side with the flexibilities now offered by those agreements. Here, just one example, one percentage point of local market share is equivalent to approximately EUR 30 million in incremental profit. Moving that line, it's not happened overnight. We've got to compete against some very strong carriers to gain that market share, but it's extremely valuable. If you look British Airways, London and Paris are not identical markets. Obviously, the business component in London is larger. British Airways had a similar split many years back and made the decision to significantly reduce the number of connection customers and move to its most profitable segments. As you know, British Airways, the Heathrow hub, is the most profitable hub of any of the legacy carriers in Europe.
We are going to move from 49% connections or 49% local 1 percentage point at a time to somewhere in between 50% and 60%. We're not quite sure what's optimal yet, but it's definitely higher than the 49%. Here again, that's from a connection angle. If you look from a premium segment angle, you can see here in 2014, the long-haul premium seat capacity and how Air France market share has gone from 58% to 54%. Our market share significantly reduced. Why is that? In large part because of the restrictive contracts we had in place. Here again, if we can increase 1 percentage point, a market share increase will drive approximately EUR 10 million incremental operating profit. As I said, I can't put enough emphasis on how valuable this new flexibility we have with our pilot agreement.
It's both this production balance, which will help us on the split between local and connection customers, as well as ensuring we have the right cabin mix, between Premium Economy seats and economy seats. I've been asked by many people, and there have been comments in the press, "Is Air France going to become the premium A airline versus KLM, the B airline?" Well, absolutely not. What I think you see here is that the opportunity to leverage the different market in Paris versus what we have flowing over Amsterdam is to ensure we optimize the size of aircraft and the size of the premium cabins at Air France. It's not to change the quality of service of the cabins, it's really to ensure that the size of the aircraft and the size of the cabins are positioned as best they can.
Moving on now to our other businesses. Our non-passenger businesses, customer data, as I said, is becoming more and more important. Our Flying Blue loyalty program, we have a lot of room to increase and ensure that drives more value to the group. We have a strong cargo program which contributes a lot of revenue and profit to the group. Of course, a strong engineering and maintenance division, maintenance group, which is one of the best in the world. Here, we have a great opportunity to further leverage our toolkit. As I said, we got a very powerful loyalty program. We flew over 100 million customers last year. We have a lot of data. We're looking to better personalize our offer to provide more attractive customer value propositions at a lower cost of sale.
You can see here our share of bookings through direct sales in NDC from 2017 have gone from 40% to 47%, and you can see that's helped drive ancillary revenues up from EUR 550 million to an estimated EUR 730 million for this year. As you know, when you're able to drive the shopping experience direct to our channels, we can display our ancillary revenues in a much clearer format. On the Flying Blue side, we have a solid foundation to grow. It's not new for us, loyalty programs. We're going to be introducing the sale of miles. Many new digital experience offers will come out, and we'll really start to drive payment in miles with new currency using Flying Blue miles. Engineering & Maintenance.
As I just mentioned, we have built up over many years a strong position, and Engineering & Maintenance forms a key part of our DNA at the Group. Our margins remain strong and robust over the years. It's contribute very positively to the Group operating results. Our order book grew by 36%. From, you can see here, from 2015 to 2019, 36%, and we have leveraged both the Air France and KLM fleet renewal to build a strong presence with the next generation products. The GEnx, the LEAP as two examples, and we'll continue to do this with the A220 as we introduce that aircraft type. Air France-KLM Engineering & Maintenance already has a strong worldwide presence.
We have built up an enviable position in the fastest growing EM market, Asia, which represents today about 41% of our sales, and this will help us feed long-term growth. Building on our current success and our strong airline DNA, our plan is to invest and further develop around four priorities in order to remain an industry leader. With E&M, we're going to continue to focus on improving efficiency and operational performance, first for Air France and KLM. To have this group inside our group really helps drive the operational performance of both airlines. We've got profitable growth opportunities, as I just showed you, and we have a good history here over the last couple of years of showing how we've been able to execute on that global footprint.
We're focused on the strongest areas of growth, and we're going to fully leverage the digitization and artificial intelligence, which is now becoming more and more relevant in this business, such as data analytics and ensuring that we can take full advantage of predictive maintenance. Third, cargo. The cargo division of Air France-KLM, of the group, is extremely important. We have six freighters, six full freighters in the fleet. We have four 747s based in Amsterdam, and we have two 777 freighters based in Paris. We are the number 5 global carrier. We have a 3.8% market share around the world, and we have 135 trucking stations in place. In terms of size of cargo hubs, Amsterdam and Paris are the number 2 and the number 3.
We have 130-plus direct intercontinental connections. The network that we offer to our customers is extremely large. We have over 1,000 weekly flown frequencies. Big revenue, more than EUR 2.3 billion in revenue. Over 1 million freight tons that we have in here. Should be a billion there. 3,800 full-time employees are dedicated to this part of the business. Consolidation, as you know, there was an announcement yesterday with Air Europa. Consolidation for us, obviously very important. We're looking at this from a pragmatically input, strategic, financially conservative way. We will play an active role when and where it does make sense for our group. Strict financial discipline is important. Some examples, the integration costs were higher than expected when Lufthansa and EasyJet stated that the integration of Air Berlin was much more expensive than planned, and this, we believe, weighs on their bottom line.
A lot of bankruptcies have taken place and are going to help consolidate the markets where those bankruptcies took place. Of course, consolidation in Europe is not at the same level as in the U.S. When and where it does make financial sense, both strategically and we believe from a culture perspective, we will look to move. Last but not least, definitely not least, both Anne and Pieter will go into this in much more detail, is our fifth pillar, which will embrace all our actions, and that's commitment to sustainability. I'll put up one metric, and I've already mentioned it, which we're very proud of, and it's not well known, is that Air France-KLM does have the number one position. We've already done a lot of work around this. We have the number one position on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index.
To conclude, I'll just go through here. On the efforts that we're working on to decrease our unit revenue, so an enormous amount of work, and as I hope you've seen with these two or three examples, the flexible labor contracts we now have in place at Air France and the benefits it's providing to Transavia France have a huge benefit in decreasing unit cost, that is getting the A380s out. Number of aircraft configurations that we're going to pull. That's in the form of the simplified fleet. The savings that the next generation aircraft will provide, definitely bringing down unit cost with a more efficient domestic network. You'll see with the ATRs and the 145s, Embraer 145s coming out of Hop. Utilization will bring down unit cost. The operational transformation with the A380s out, the operation will be much smoother at Roissy.
KLM has already done an enormous amount of work on this. That will continue, simplifying the organization. Air France is a complicated operation. It's a complicated place to work. We have enormous talent at Air France. We are looking to ensure that the makeup of our teams on the management side evolve to be positioned for us to win. KLM had started this type of work a few years ago, continue to do that. Of course, group synergies will drive savings as well. Group synergies will be embedded in all of the above unit cost initiatives. There are some unique extra ones that we'll focus on on their own.
On the improvement on the revenue side, pulling out the two unclear brands of Hop and Joon, and focusing on the mother brand, Air France, will make this Air France brand, the value proposition much clearer. Anne will go through the work that we're doing to ensure that the consistency of the products that we have at Air France are well understood. The networks and the gauge, of course, with the new fleet, be further optimized. The market positioning. With the flexibility that we now have with the pilot contracts, with the decision to clarify the brands, the key brands at Air France, La Première, Business, Premium Economy, and Economy will be positioned to be best in class, in particular on the premium side. The Orly strategy with Transavia having the ability to grow, there are definitely opportunities for high-quality profit growth there.
On the Flying Blue and digital side, more personalization and driving more ancillary revenue, huge benefit. Transavia growth, as I've already said, and then engineering and maintenance and cargo at both of the large brands, both the large airlines, will drive unit revenue improvements. The breakdown of where we're looking to get these improvements, both on the cost side and on the revenue side. The first part of the presentation, I went through what we're doing to optimize our operating model. Nothing would be possible without this improvement that has been achieved through the commercial and fleet flexibility. The internal and airline processes, we're targeting EUR 400 million to EUR 475 million of improvement. The fleet will drive EUR 400 million to EUR 450 million of improvement, and EUR 300 million to EUR 355 million group synergies are embedded in the above two numbers.
For a total of EUR 800 million and EUR 900 million of improvement on optimizing our operating model. On the passenger revenue side of our go-forward plan, clarifying the actual brands themselves and the portfolio and the offering, we're looking at EUR 25 million-EUR 50 million there. Ensuring that we pivot Air France to be able to participate in a greater way in its most profitable markets will drive EUR 200 million, at least EUR 200 million in incremental profit. The growth of Transavia, we're being conservative here, putting a EUR 75 million-EUR 100 million target. Then better leveraging the digital and the personalized travel opportunities that we have with the huge database that our 100 million passengers provide us will drive another EUR 50 million. We're not putting a number here for leveraging European consolidation. As I said, we'll continue to pragmatically evaluate all of these opportunities.
On our other non-airline businesses, we're looking for Flying Blue to generate EUR 50 million-EUR 100 million, E&M EUR 50 million, and cargo, we don't break cargo out, to drive a continued positive contribution. A total of EUR 100 million-EUR 150 million contribution there. The waterfall at the mid-cycle, we are targeting a 7%-8% margin at the group. That, of course, is taking into account the high cost of operating in France. We're not assuming in this picture here that there's any change. As I said, we're going to continue to lobby very hard. Under the current environment, we are targeting a 7%-8% margin in the mid-cycle.
EUR 900 million of that improvement is going to be assigned to improving the bottom line of Air France, EUR 250 million to KLM, EUR 100 million to Transavia, and then EUR 100 million to other synergies that we will drive amongst throughout the group. Going from 4% to 7%-8% in the mid-cycle. This is our plan going forward. Thank you for your attention to this part, and we'll now move on to Pieter.
Thank you, Ben. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. [Foreign language]. [Foreign language]. I promise you these are the last words in Dutch out of here. Ben just took us through a lot of dynamics at both airlines. Anne and myself will have the privilege to go one level deeper in the strategy we do at both KLM and at Air France. Maybe it's good to have a little reflection on where we are coming from and what we did and what was the strategy for the past couple of years. Ben just mentioned it already. We had the opportunity to celebrate, on October 7, our 100th anniversary, which was a very special moment indeed, not only for KLM, but actually for the country.
No one could have missed the festivities which we did, and I'm very proud of the teams who organized everything and made sure that it was a wonderful success. A few words on the journey we have embarked, and you'll see it back in the results and also reflecting on the steps we're taking forward. We have set a clear strategy back in 2014, where we made some very clear strategic choices. When we speak about cargo later, I think one of the choices were in 2014, we still had numerous full freighter aircraft. Today, we're down from 15 full freighter aircraft down to four. We've made very clear choices what we do in the field of engineering and maintenance. It's very important for me that we made some clear choices, and we move them into coherent way in execution.
In fact, these five pillars you see here on the right-hand side of the slide are the pillars we have year by year, we have executed. A lot of efforts here on the customer and the customer appreciation. I'll come back on that. Network and fleet is a very fundamental issue for any airline, and Ben already mentioned quite a couple of things on the network and the fleet of both Air France and KLM. Let me go one level deeper. Operational excellence being the key and looking at the operational performance here, it's clearly a challenge at Schiphol being more and more busy. Our people clearly are our brand, and Ben mentioned the appreciation for our staff, and I would just like to underpin what we have been doing there and the appreciation for all the achievements made.
Last but not least, the pillar of innovation and sustainability, which is increasingly important in the world we operate and becomes really a license to operate when it comes to sustainability. In the execution, I like, it's not my own quote, but I use it sometimes to the annoyance of my team about every day, "A strategy without execution is a hallucination." In fact, what we have been doing is put a lot of emphasis in the last couple of years on the execution of our plans. You'll find here on the left-hand side, the exact same phrasing as Ben just mentioned in his slide, and on the right part, you see how we're going to do that execution.
Left is the strategy and the choices, right is the execution where we put very clear targets and ambitions for all these various aspects in terms of what is our net promoter score for our customers? What is our passenger fleet numbers, and how are we going to make sure that our fleet will continue to be replaced by more modern aircraft? Operational excellence, people and organization, and innovation and sustainability. Very clear targets on every aspect, basically, of our journey there. Where do we stand now? And just for the benefit of having you in the room today, just share a little bit where the breakdown of the EUR 11 billion of revenues on the KLM side is coming from.
Roughly 70% of all our revenues at KLM is coming from our passenger business, engineering and maintenance, cargo, and Transavia are roughly counting each of them for 10%. Engineering and maintenance, there's always some double counting for internal work and external work, which really explains the fact that the numbers for those of you calculating very quick, I would not expect anything different from this incredible audience. You'll find some double counting here on the engineering and maintenance numbers. Roughly EUR 11 billion of turnover. Still a lot of business focus, also leisure. Looking at the point of sale, again, coming from a small country with a relatively small city, one out of four customers is Dutch, three out of four customers is non-Dutch.
Our network is the core of what we are doing and making sure that we run the network as we do it. We've gone through some steps in terms of improving our operating margin. You see on the right-hand side of the slide an increase in the last few years from a 1.8% margin to a little over 10% or hovering around 10% in 2017 and 2018, which were clearly good years in terms of economic environment, fuel price, and all the efforts which we have been doing.
What's very important that the improvement have been matched by an increase in the level of investments we have been doing. We've basically tripled our level of investments in the past years to a very large extent in fleet, but also in digitization, also in our staff, but also very much so in making sure that our customers have a great experience. For those of you traveling through Schiphol, we have recently opened our new wide-body lounge, our intercontinental lounge, I should say. It's a two-floor lounge.
It's a great asset for our customers, and with Schiphol being congested, and I'll come back on that, it's really an asset in having a customer experience on that level there. This has led to, basically, and Frédéric will go into the consolidated numbers here to the net debt for EBITDA, which has gradually gone down from a level of 5 we still had in range of 2012, to 1.3, what it is today. Clearly driven by a reduction on the net debt levels you see on the right-hand side. Also here you see the numbers in terms of operating margin, where the year to date has been added. These are the numbers which were released last week in terms of performance.
Having said that, we need to move forward, and you saw in Ben's slide a breakdown at the very end of EUR 250 million of initiatives and actions and improvements to move forward. We could break down this EUR 250 million by these three brackets of foreseen improvement. The first one is continued cost focus and operational excellence. Again, we believe there are still opportunities in terms of cost reduction and improving our operational performance. We have launched a wide range of actions to use much more artificial intelligence, and I should say very sophisticated tool in order to manage our operations. Fleet renewal, a very important aspect. We have been phasing out gradually the 747s. We had a total of 22. We're now down to little under 10. We have phased in the 787s. First 787-9s are in, and we have another two 787-10s meanwhile.
We have 15 787s in operation. There's more to come. The fleet renewal here is really helping for the remaining part of our fleet renewal, both on the Embraer E2s, which will come in as from 2021, and a further continuation of investments in the 787-10s. I'm very pleased with the steps which we have taken with Anne and Ben in the last year, where we optimized the fleet allocation and basically made some optimization in the allocation between Air France and KLM, helping Air France to step up the speed of the 350s and helping KLM to step up the speed of the introduction of the 787. It's an important aspect, and clearly also some revenue mix optimizations. These numbers are matching the numbers you saw here on Ben's presentation earlier.
In total, adding to an amount of EUR 250 million of initiatives to make sure that we continue to move forward. Few words here on digital. I'm incredibly proud of all the steps we have done in the field of digital in the last few years. Clearly from a cost perspective, also very much from a customer perspective. The fact that all our staff now has digital devices in order to make sure that our customers have a better experience and can be addressed right on the spot, that's an incredibly important element and really helps us also to the revenue optimization in terms of personalization and more individual approach to our customers. Few words here on the key drivers and that basically the key drivers for our customers are setting the key priorities for our business.
At the end of the day, it's all about our customers and not so much about the ways and means how we do it. When we look at the integrated approach we're having, we really continue to optimize that. Again, with the tight situation at Schiphol, an optimal situation in terms of using our assets is extremely important. Clearly schedule for us is the key driver being a hub carrier, and the connection and the connectivity rate is the key driver of what we are doing. We see that back in why people choose to fly on KLM and really helping us in moving forward. Customers, I mentioned already a few times. We have stepped up really our efforts in terms of our Net Promoter Score. On the left-hand side of the slide here, you see the development of the Net Promoter Score since 2014.
A gradual increase from 36 in 2014 up to 42 last year. Every point of NPS is really a challenge to make one point of NPS improvement. Clearly this year, with all the operational disturbances we had at Schiphol in terms of runway maintenance, fuel supplies, so we had a lot of operational problems really not helping us to keep that very same level of a 42 NPS. Just to underline that, you see on the right-hand side, the non-perceived failure NPS. That's in fact the score our customers are giving us in case of no disruptions. You see that we are continued to move forward, and even now we're at the 62 score for our customers in case we're not having any disruptions. The key priority for us is to make sure first, we have less disruptions to the extent we can control it ourselves.
Secondly, make sure that the experience is better in case of disruptions. I'm very proud that we are back on the APEX 5-star ranking. We got that award, or that recognition I should say, really. We got that recognition in September, when KLM was back, I think, I don't know after how many years, but we were back on the 5-star ranking, which is not the case for many of our competitors. I think it's underlining the investments we have been doing in our customer experience. All our wide-body fleet have flat beds now. We're start to convert all the aircraft with Wi-Fi, make sure that the lounge is ready, the Flying Blue program. All the elements of the customer journey are nicely coming together and resulting in this 5-star APEX recognition by our customers. Fleet already mentioned by Ben. Maybe shown a little bit different here.
We see how we have progressed in the last years in terms of fleet simplification. Today, almost at the 2020, we clearly have reduced our aircraft number of types. We still have a couple of 747s, as mentioned. The last one should be out by 2021-ish. It's not the exact date, but that's the timeframe. By 2025, for sure, we'll have one group of aircraft types, the 777s and the 787s, for which cockpit is flying in the same fashion. It's really a very efficient way of organizing this, and we get rid of the situation we had not so long ago, even in 2010, with a mixture of MD-11, 747s, 330s, and 777s. Again, for KLM's network and the routes we're flying and routes we're operating, this mixture of 777s and 78s is a good thing.
It allows us, in fact, to increase the average gauge and to fly larger aircraft going forward. A couple of years ago, we did have five full passenger aircraft with 400 seats. Today, we do have 14 777-300s and another two on order. It just shows a little bit how we are moving forward to larger aircraft dealing with the congestion at Schiphol Airport. How did that translate into the development of our ASKs? We did have a long-haul ASK from 2011 to 2019, growing by 24%, and a medium-haul growth even larger from an index of 100 in 2011 up 34% to 2019.
We have really stepped up our network, and part of the success, you saw the numbers in terms of profitability, has been able to build a network and making sure that we're active and attractive actually for our customers in all these markets with a high-frequency network, what we're doing here. Clearly, that brought us to a worldwide network with 171 destinations, as we do have it today, with a mixture of 93 long-haul and 78 medium-haul. It's also interesting to see for me that the network is a dynamic one, 14 destinations closed, 46 opened. In fact, we're all the time reviewing our network and our agility in the market. Ben gave the example of San Jose, where Air France and KLM operate together.
I think Fortaleza in Brazil is another nice example where the two airlines are operating. Together we start to build up a very nice market and a very nice position really there. You see the network basically is balanced throughout the world. I think it's one of the biggest assets for KLM and also the biggest asset for the group that we are less vulnerable to local changes in South America or in China or in other parts of the world, because we do have this worldwide coverage. About a quarter of our long-haul seats is to the U.S. The rest is pretty much spread around the world.
Clearly, the joint venture with Delta being still the backbone of our long-haul operation, and I should say the strength of what we're doing and really something unique which stands us out as Air France-KLM in the industry with this very strong position we have with Delta and soon to be added with Virgin. I mentioned these partners already. A lot of progress should be made in other parts of the world. I mentioned Delta already, also our network in China, we have been able to build with our partners, both China Eastern and China Southern. Since China Eastern is also a shareholder in Air France-KLM, we have really stepped up our efforts with China Eastern.
A couple of weeks ago, we announced a further addition of Virgin into that joint venture, strengthening really our position in this incredibly fast-growing and continues to growing Chinese market where Air France-KLM together is a leader between China and Europe. I think it is really underpinning our global presence and our global activity around the world. The value-focused model has been mentioned by Ben. I mentioned here the key topics where we are and the key priorities going forward. These four pillars have been very much the basis of what we have been doing in the past couple of years and will be the basis in what we continue to do forward. I mentioned already the E2s and the 787-10s.
That's going to be the key issue for 2020 and 2021 to make sure that we do have these aircraft coming in and phased in in a quick and efficient way. An incredible focus on asset utilization. You saw these slides. I think we're one of the leaders in the industry when it comes to asset utilization with wide-body aircraft flying around 16 hours per day, 16-17, the new 787s even more. The joke we say internally, it's an aircraft, it's not a ground craft, so it should fly. With that, we put all the efforts making sure that it's flying as much as possible. We do that combined with a higher load factor, so you see a gradual increase in our book load factor. Real load factor slightly lower, but this combination really brings 170 aircraft, 700 flights per day.
For those of you still paying attention, Ben mentioned 350, so that is the departures. This is the total departures and arrivals here on Schiphol Airport and resulting in 100,000 passengers a day, what we are having. I guess we are not at the end of it, and I believe that even in terms of utilization, we can continue to strive to improve that. The fact that we continue with our fleet simplification really helps. Clearly, our staff is the key focus in that. Let me take this page first and then go back. A little composition here of what is the composition of the KLM staff, and on the left-hand side, you see the age. I think it is very important that we have been able to hire in the last few years a lot of new people. You see 4,797 new hires in the past few years.
That was really very helpful. You see much less in the 6 to 10-year timeframe. We're catching up for a time where we didn't hire any new staff. Like any company, especially bringing in new talents and bringing in new technology and people knowing about AI and artificial intelligence and making sure that we use that, we put a lot of emphasis on new hires. Clearly, a lot of operational staff. 3,000 pilots, 10,000 cabin crew, and some 6,000 working on the ground, and then the other composition. Staff is incredibly important. With that, we have created the structure on focusing on the transformation of the organization, making sure that we put a lot of emphasis on our leadership program.
At the end of the day, our social dialogue, which has worked pretty well in the last few years, where clearly our profit-sharing mechanism has helped in moving forward. I'm very proud and glad, actually, we had a couple of years with nice profit-sharing as a good way to get everyone motivated and on board for the things we are doing. That has resulted in a very positive employee promoter score, which I think is very nice. We're not only having an increase in our customer appreciation, our NPS, but also our employee appreciation. You see the employee promoter score here on the side, which is nicely going up and reflecting what people are feeling about working for KLM, yet going hand-in-hand with an increase of productivity, 13% in the last couple of years if we take the ASK per FTE in terms of productivity improvement.
With that, we realized that we need to do next steps in order to move forward. We have launched a wide range of initiatives. Next to CLA Talks, we should also have more focus on the innovation. We are working really together with the teams in various parts of the organization. This is just four examples. For example, let me highlight one, the additive manufacturing being done at the Engineering & Maintenance team, where we really start to experiment with 3D printing in order to make sure that this really helps us to reduce our cost. We're not doing this for fun. We do this to deliver a better customer service, and at the end of the day, also lower our cost. That brings us to the topic of sustainability.
I'm sure you've all noticed our Fly Responsibly initiative, which we launched in June of this year. I think The Guardian in the U.K. called us the only woke airline in the world, which I took as a compliment. It really was very nice to show how, in fact, this is really helping us in order to get, not only for our employees but also increasingly for our customers, the initiatives around sustainability there. We have set a couple of horizons. The first one is 2025. We continue to invest in biofuel. We launched some actions to create a biofuel factory in the Netherlands. Also have stepped up our efforts in terms of CO2 compensation and making sure that all our ground equipment is more sustainable. Somewhat later, 2030, all the fleet renewal should be done.
You saw what we're doing in terms of fleet renewal. We put here electric flights 2050. You see on the right bottom a futuristic program being worked on by the Delft University of Technology, which is called the Flying-V. We will not be building aircraft, we will not be making aircraft ourselves. I think it's a great way to work together with university, make sure that we're aligned on our ambitions and our targets. A lot of emphasis on this, a lot of positive response. In fact, when we celebrated KLM 100 years, we shared this all over the world. We really get very positive response, basically in all the countries we're operating in, ranging from China to Brazil to European countries. Very positive feedback. Really helping us to continue that pioneering role and position. In closing, a few words on Schiphol.
We know that we have reached a ceiling. This chart shows a line in orange, which is the number of movements, and a line in blue, which is the number of passengers. It just shows that after 2005, we had a 23% growth in movements. Today, the ceiling of 500,000 and a 61% increase in passengers. Today, Schiphol Airport, 70 million customers. It shows that even with a limited number of growth in terms of movements, we could still have growth in passenger numbers. There is some movement on the file in terms of political understanding that further growth could be accommodated up to 540,000 in coming years. A lot of details to be worked out.
The opening of Lelystad, and I know some of you have always a difficulty to pronounce it, but the opening of Lelystad is still being expected somewhere next year and should really help us to move forward. We made a very big announcement that we're going to replace one of our flights to Brussels by train, really to start experimenting with luggage transfer, through check-in, disruption handling, and so on and so forth. The Transavia was already mentioned. We have stepped up really our efforts to make sure that we maximize the synergies between KLM and Transavia in the Netherlands. Clearly, the combination of the two brands in the Dutch market is extremely important. For Transavia, the Dutch market is the number one market. For KLM, it's just 25%.
If we combine it, we really can serve our customers better in terms, for example, of our Flying Blue, where we can now earn and burn on Transavia in terms of codeshares , where we do have 27 code shares. A whole range of initiatives we are doing together, and just to make sure that we remain the number one low cost in the Netherlands. Amsterdam, 28 aircraft, Eindhoven nine, and Rotterdam eight, and that's about the number of airports we do have in the Netherlands. That shows our presence here at these airports. In closing, the priorities going forward, we'll continue to make sure that we have an integral approach running the business. I think it's very important to have the cargo engineering part really integrated to it, because the wide body capacity for cargo is huge.
Schiphol is going to be second part where our focus is financial health. We're matching the targets Frédéric Gagey has given us in terms of EBITDA. Still we have more ambitions going forward. A search for new synergies, Ben already mentioned it in the Air France context. Last but not least, a focus on people and technology. I think I'm two minutes late. My big apologies for that. We count usually arrival plus five minutes as on time. I count this on time. That gives me a big pleasure to introduce Anne as the next speaker. A warm round of applause for Anne. Anne?
Thank you, Pieter. Good morning, everyone. Hello, . It's easier to say than . Ben has presented you the financial trajectory, and I have a very easy task to explain you how we will improve the Air France result by EUR 900 million by 2024. Let me just start with our environmental commitments. You know it's a very strong expectation from our customers, and we want, as Pieter mentioned it, to be pioneer, to build a more sustainable travel experience for our current and for the future generations. We have also renewed our environmental ambition, with strong commitments. This one. The first one is that we will decrease our CO2 emission by 50% by 2030 compared to 2005, with a whole bunch of action. Further renewal of the fleet. Each new generation aircraft brings a decrease in CO2 emission by 20%-25%.
Eco piloting, decrease of all the weight on board, and also carbon neutrality for our ground activities. The second commitment we just took last month, sorry, is to, above regulatory compensation, to offset 100% of our CO2 emission on all our domestic flights. It means 450 flights per day where our customer will be able to fly totally neutral. The third one is around single-use plastic. We have committed to remove 1,300 tons of single-use plastic each year, and we are beginning, next January with all plastic glasses, plastic cutlery, stirrers, et cetera. I think it's very important to show our customers that we're fighting to build this green, sustainable aircraft, even if we can't build aircraft ourselves. As Ben said, above CSR, we are launching an end-to-end transformation at Air France.
We've made a full diagnostic in the spring, in April, with a benchmark on all our processes and our cost levels, to compare with the whole industry and to evaluate our potential. During the summer, we have defined our action plans and our projects, and now we are in the implementation phase. As Pieter says, we don't want to hallucinate anymore, but we want to come to the execution. Sorry, it was this slide, but you will have it afterwards. Our financial recovery is launched now around seven clusters. Five clusters in order to optimize our operating model. The clusters are a simplified organization, the optimization of all our external spends. Of course, the fleet, as Ben said, this third key lever is the renewal of the fleet and the domestic network redesign, and I will go further into more details.
Also to tackle our tech transformation, and the fifth driver is the operational transformation. We want to reduce our operational costs through simplification and through digitization. Two clusters aim at growing profitable passenger revenue. The first one is the network redesign, and the second is about all the revenue enhancement initiatives, personalization, loyalty program, and ancillary program that can increase their contribution. Overall, it's more than 150 projects that we are closely monitoring every week in dedicated and very tough meetings. Sorry, this one. What will be the impact of these 150 projects? We estimated that overall, it will bring more than €900 million by 2024, that we can split in €400 million for the simplification projects I just mentioned, €300 million coming from the fleet renewal, and €200 million coming from the revenue enhancement. We don't want this transformation to be only an economic transformation.
We want also to measure three very important KPIs, the NPS, the Net Promoter Score for the customer satisfaction, that is at the basis of everything, the Employee Promoter Score for the employee engagement, and the major KPI for the CSR is the CO2 emissions. Let's now focus on the simplification project. In 2019, we took short-term emergency measures in order to keep our costs on track. In 2020, we are accelerating the implementation of transformation projects, and I will go a bit into the details to give you some highlights. Regarding external spends, we are currently reviewing all of our contracts, all of our providers. Regarding IT, we are prioritizing and standardizing our solutions, and we want, of course, to develop further agility in our innovation projects. Regarding the organization, you know that Air France is an old airline, not as old as KLM, but 86 years old.
86 years old of history, of layers sometimes. We want to simplify our organization that is still complex, to break silos, with a specific focus on overheads and on support functions with principles like delayering and mutualization of some support functions as communication, HR, or finance. The fourth important stream that we will accelerate this year is operations. The improvement of the operational performance brings some decrease in the customer compensation costs, but we also tackle fuel consumptions with eco-piloting. We also tackle the maintenance cost, and maintenance is fully engaged in this transformation, and we will launch an ambitious supply chain program in 2020. If we look at what will deliver this simplification program, we begin in 2020 with EUR 80 million, and we ramp up to more than EUR 400, sorry, million in 2024. On the second pillar, that is a fleet simplification.
Ben has said a lot about the complexity of Air France fleet. I will only say that we just have received our two first Airbus A350. We will have six this summer, 10 next summer in 2021, and 28 by 2025. Regarding the medium-haul fleet, we've ordered 60 Airbus A220-300 that will replace our Airbus A318 and A319. The first ones will come as of September 2021. Regarding hub fleet, hub fleet is delivering operating flights for hub feeding in Charles de Gaulle and also on domestic network. We will phase out, I think by the end of this year, ATR and also Embraer 145 next year. This change on the fleet bring multiple benefits. Of course, clear savings. Unit cost, when you look at the cost per ASK of Airbus A220, it's a decrease of 10%. Airbus A350, it's a decrease of 15% of the unit cost.
Of course, it also brings operation reliability and enhanced in-flight experience. If you take an Airbus A220, you'll see that the comfort, the volume, the pitch you can benefit from is a lot higher than what we can find on our current fleet. Of course, on the CSR efficiency, the renewal of the fleet is the first level. For example, the Airbus A350 consumes 25% less fuel than the current aircraft it will replace. Regarding the network, I think that Ben went into many details about it, so I will only say that our priority is to build on our main asset, that is our strong position in Paris. You know that Paris is, at the same time, a world leading leisure destination and a strong position for business traffic with many global firms that have their headquarters in Paris.
Taking more value of this kind of traffic is key for our transformation. On the network side, we think that Air France hub can be further optimized through dynamic network management. What's that? It's just to relocate fleet and flights from less dynamic areas to more profitable areas, and that's what we've done this summer, and we will go on next summer. It's also to increase our footprint on the premium local and French market flows. We are also improving our asset utilizations. You can see that we have improved by 12% our medium-haul aircraft utilization in 2019, and by 3% on the long haul. We also think that the increase of the load factor you can observe is not finished, and we have room for improvement, also on the load factor side.
This network redesign also enhances customer experience by bringing more consistency to the customer offer, with a full flat product on our premium routes to U.S.A. and to Asia, with a consistent product on each route every day. Also for operational performance, because we add spare aircraft without decreasing aircraft global utilization. Maybe a focus, because it's important in our core margin, we have to fix the losses of our domestic network through a whole restructuring plan. First, we are in the process of adjusting all this network to face the high-speed train competition, and we are also reducing poor performing transversal routes that are exposed to low-cost competition. We are simplifying our operation. As you know, on the domestic market, we only have one brand now, and Hop! is operating the flights for Air France and under Air France brand.
We are also adapting the French station size through a voluntary departure plan. This results in a decrease of minus 15% of capacity between 2018 and 2021. This plan will bring an improvement of EUR 100 million to the domestic network result by 2021. Maybe just a look at the new opportunities we see in Orly Airport due to a better connection with Paris, with new metro lines, like Line 14 for French people, and a better customer experience because of the refurbishment of the whole airport. We want to take two initiatives. The first one is to launch quality routes that are tailored for business customers from Orly to Europe. We will start in next April with the opening of a route from Orly to Madrid.
The second one will be to launch leisure European destinations to adjust the seasonality of French business demand in bank holidays, in weekends, and of course, during the vacation months of August. That's something we've tried in Charles de Gaulle, the seasonality, and very effective in terms of network. Of course, on the Orly strategy, the growth of Transavia France is key to strengthen the number one position in Orly of Transavia. Ben has stated the pilot negotiation that was conducted this summer has unlocked the future for the growth of Transavia, with the removal of Transavia France fleet cap that was capped to 14, now it's unlimited. The removal also of all commercial constraints like wintering operations with Air France or codesharing with Air France, now it's fully opened. Let's come to customer experience, because it's another major goal for improvement.
You know the definition of net promoter score. You ask the customers at the end of the flight if they would promote your brand with a grade from 0 to 10, and you take the promoter giving 9 or 10s and minus the detractors giving 0 to 6. You can imagine that half of our customers are French. It's not so easy for a French customer to give 9s or 10s, but still, we can see this year first very encouraging results in the NPS measure, with 25 year-to-date in 2019. We see it increasing in the last month, 30 in September, 32 in October. We are targeting a 40 NPS in the coming years. We see that the improvements come from three key drivers, the product and the services up-market move, the operation performance, and the way we handle the disruptions.
I will maybe just focus on some example of the customer experience improvement on board. Just highlight two of them. First one is, of course, long-haul cabin modernization. 80% of our long-haul fleet will be at the highest standards in next year. Of course, full flat bed seats in Business Class, high-definition screens everywhere, and more comfort everywhere, and 100% by 2022. With the addition of the refurbishment of our current aircraft and the entry of service of the new generation aircraft with the highest standards on board. Of course, Wi-Fi is now a basic expectation from our customers. 50% of all our aircraft, short-haul, medium-haul, long-haul, will be equipped with Wi-Fi by the end of this year, 100% during next year.
The second topic that is very important for customers when they buy an Air France ticket, they expect, even French customers, to live a bit of the French art de vivre and the French gastronomy. The expectation is quite high. In business class, that's why all our business meals now are signed by Michelin-starred chefs. We also want, by next January, our customers to be able to pre-order before their flight their meal. It's some details, but it's very important in the customer experience. For a consistent experience, we also want to introduce a business class on our French domestic network, in the beginning of next year. On the ground, access to Sky Priority, access to the lounges, and on board, a dedicated front cabin with blocked middle seats and a food and beverage dedicated offer.
We think it will be good for our customer connecting to Charles de Gaulle in the premium cabin, but also for the consistency of the whole brand on the domestic network. On ground, of course, we want also a serene, peaceful ground experience, so lounges upgrade. We've done a lot in the last two years, and we are continuing next year with refurbishments of all the international lounge, Geneva, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and a big lounge in Terminal F for Schengen flights that will be available at the end of next year. Another key point is the way we handle disruptions, and we lean on technology for this to enhance the experience on the massive rebooking tools so that the solution given to the customer comes very quickly.
Also on technologies of bot and digital vouchers that we can push to the customer to accelerate the customer service in case of disruptions. Operational performance. Of course, the basic expectation. Our business is complex, many kind of aléa, so we are fine-tuning our processes with first good results this year. You have the result of the ranking in terms of arrival punctuality for the last month. You can see that among European airlines, our ranking has improved. In September, we were the third after, I think, Aeroflot and Finnair. We also observe strong results in terms of completion factor, baggage eye rate, and connection success for our customers. We also launch with our partner, Delta, that is really best in class in terms of operational performance, a program that we call Cancel the Cancellation.
It means that we want to drastically reduce the disruptions. Let's come to innovation. Of course, technology is an enabler for our transformation, but I would prefer to focus on the human touch that is really part of our DNA. Data really helps us to transform our core experience. We have now a customer 360 view that is connected to more than 20 touch points. That means that customer data are available to all our staff, ground staff, cabin crew, pilots. They can know through their iPads. Each one is equipped with an individual iPad. They know the customer preference for frequent flyers, what is the preferred meal, what is the allergies. They can also anticipate the needs and create an emotion. I will give you two examples.
If a customer books a ticket saying it's the birthday of its honeymoon, the call center agent will put the data, the cabin crew will welcome the couple with champagne. It happens a lot, it's not just one case. If a customer has an incident at check-in or I don't know, it will be reported, the cabin crew will do the maximum to offset this kind of disruption. You see, it's really data and technology enabling the human experience. To finish, I will end by saying that none of this transformation would be possible without the engagement of Air France staff and the renewed social dialogue. We've signed 26 agreements in the last 12 months. It's an ongoing process. Last Friday, we just signed a very important agreement with our cabin crew.
I would finish by saying thank you to Air France staff for their support in this transformation, for their support in designing and simplifying our process, and for their commitment to reinvent Air France. Thank you very much. My apologies to my preferred but unique CFO, Mr. Gagey.
Okay, slide number 98. There is still 150 and then we'll be able to move to the Q&A. You are very patient. I will try to be a bit quicker than the program if possible. Okay. The problem is to try to summarize all this type of info and to see what does that mean in terms of the financial path and financial trajectory. Before that, just one or two slides of where do we stand today. I think that probably the most remarkable evolution for the group since 2012 is the evolution of the leverage. As you know, we spend a lot of time and energy in order to try to come back in an area of the adjusted net debt on EBITDA, compatible with a normal relationship with banks, I will say.
It was clearly not the case in 2012, when we had a level of 5 for CS ratio. By itself is not a drama, at least it's showing some fragility, as with airlines, which are quite higher, to be honest. I think that the consensus into the group, to consider that we should come back to a level compatible with something like investment grade, was very clear. I think that when you look at the evolution of CS ratio, it has been a successful strategy. Today, we are at 1.5. It is something which is comparable to IAG and Lufthansa.
There is some difference in the calculation, how do you treat pensions, et cetera, but normally, we think that these numbers are all correct, which mean that Air France-KLM today is comparable to the two big peers in Europe and with a level compatible with an investment grade. Of course, over the period, it is not in '19 with last 12 months. It is -4.3 of unit cost reduction over the period. I have two remarks on that. First, it is not a lot. You can say -4.3, okay, just a small effort. I will be very happy, to be honest, to see airports having decreased the charge by 4.3 over the period. I will be very happy to see the price for aircraft going down -4.3 over the period, and I will say the same for a lot of core suppliers.
You know the story of where the airlines industry is in the value chain. You know that many of our suppliers are oligopolistic or monopolistic, and to be honest, such performance in terms of unit cost is something I consider as extremely positive. We are not the only one to have achieved such a result. I say that if you compare the performance of Air France-KLM to some others, we are really not the last one. Part of it is coming from a strict control in terms of the development in FTEs. We have the FTEs on the right with the blue bar, and the green line is the productivity. It is partly explained by the sale of Servair, which is explaining the drop in 2015-2016.
Not only, I think during all this period, we have increased capacity, increased traffic, and also exerted a very strict control in terms of FTE, and the result is what you see on the slide. As a conclusion, with all this approach, of course, but also that we share with the rest of the industry, an improvement of the operating margin following the crisis of 2009, which hit dramatically the airlines industry, peak in 2017. As we commented last week when we presented the review of 2019, we are today a macro environment, which is clearly a bit less positive compared to the last two years. With one issue, Air France-KLM is not at the top in terms of profitability, if you look at the European airline. Clearly, and you know that by heart and better than me, IAG is presenting a very high margin.
Finally, the big point I would like to comment, which is clearly explaining a large part of the plan presented to you this morning, the difference of margin between Air France and KLM. With two period, you see that on the graph between 2012-2015, a gap of 2.5% in terms of operating margin between Air France and KLM. In 2016, 2017, 2018, an enlargement of this gap, which is clearly, I will say, a source of frustration. Frustration first, because, of course, it impacts the global profitability of the group. I think also it is not a sustainable situation. Clearly, the cohesion between the two carriers is something which is extremely important.
The way people, the teams work together is something very important. From that point of view, if you maintain during a two-year long period such a gap, I think is not good for the spirit and for the capability to people to work in a very open way together. I really think that to have as a target to come back to a more reasonable level of gap between these two margins is something which is extremely important. Sometimes when I'm doing road show with some of you, I have the question, what could be the normal gap between Air France and KLM in terms of operating margins? My answer is to say, probably, it is a bit like that. Also with a bit of experience, I think that probably 2.5 or two, 2.5% can be easily explainable.
Easily explainable because there is some difference of environment in France and in the Netherlands. We know in France that there is a taxation of labor, which is a bit higher and probably not optimal. A lot of macroeconomists in France indicate that when they try to judge the labor market in France. The efficiency of probably Charles de Gaulle is not the same as Schiphol. The fact that Air France has to operate two airports in Paris is not optimal, of course. Why two airports? It would be far better to have only one, when you can have both the domestic and the connecting traffic on the same platform. For all these reason, probably, to imagine that for Air France, it will be easy to have the same margin of KLM is probably a dream.
They say that probably a gap of two, 2.5% is something which could be reasonable. It was the case more or less at the beginning of the period on the slide, when we are different between two, 2.5, depending on the year. Clearly, during the last three, four years, this gap has widened, and it's a situation we have to correct, and that's a lot for Anne and for the Air France team, of course. I think that is an absolute necessity. How to explain the evolution of this gap of margin between the last years? There is some element which are all clear, all paradoxical. I leave you to judge when you look at this.
The first element to keep in mind is that when you look the labor cost as a percentage of the revenue, probably somebody not knowing very well the group will say, "Oh, it will be far bigger into Air France compared to KLM." In fact, it is not the case. We have, if you look the P&L of the two companies, what we study every month with the controllers of the group and with Anne and Pieter, the gap is in the range of 1%, 1.2%. That's a lot in terms of margin, of course, but it is not such a big difference. It is less than what it was in the past. You have at the bottom the evolution of this gap, since 2012. It is not totally homogeneous because you have a treatment of the pension for KLM.
If you look at that, you see that this gap in terms of what is the weight of labor cost in the turnover, we were at 5, now we are now at 1.2. I say it's a bit paradoxical, and it makes life a bit more complex because it could be easy to say, okay, you have just to reduce the number of FTEs in Air France and it's done. It's probably more complex than that. It is not only the labor or per revenue, it could be also the FTE or the profitability per FTE. It has to be leading to think about what is the efficiency of the process. Just for you to keep in mind, it's a bit paradoxical or half paradoxical result. Second element, which is probably more easy to interpret.
When you look the difference of margin for EBITDA, it is nearer than when you look at the operating margin. What does that mean? If you consider what is EBITDA, the difference between EBITDA and COI, that probably, the efficiency of the use of assets in Air France is probably less than KLM, or you need more asset to produce the same COI into KLM. We saw an example, or you saw an example during the presentation of Anne and Pieter, which is the fleet utilization. Clearly, KLM is extremely good in terms of fleet utilization for the long haul. Air France is not the worst in class, but it's a bit lower, and there is a hard 6-7% of difference between the two carriers.
Of course, because of the existence of the domestic network and the platform of Orly, it is a source of inefficiency in terms of fleet utilization. Here, clearly, we have assets which are less used or less intensively used by Air France than by KLM, which can explain also part of the fact that the weight of the depreciation in the Air France model is more important than in the KLM model. At least it can be a source to think about how to improve the efficiency and to contribute to the improvement of the margin of Air France. There is some other reasons which are well known. One is the existence of domestic network in France and the obligation for Air France to operate this domestic network. It is not very efficient because of the two platforms. I already indicated that.
We also know that it is a network when the intensity of the competition, mainly driven by train, is something which is extremely high. As a train, which is a political choice today for developing some trips internally in France, is developing with the recent opening of Bordeaux and also the part of the high-speed train to the west of the country. Clearly, Air France has to adjust, to adapt, to continue this endless process consisting to maintain a domestic network, but by adapting itself every year due to the development of the train. When I put all these elements together, I just remark that there is some part of the group, Air France, where profitability is all comparable or even better than in KLM. A good example is Transavia.
After some years where Transavia France was still relatively small compared to Transavia Holland, already for two years, the profitability between the two airlines, the two Transavias, is almost the same. Which means that when you exclude the legacy impact or the impact of the legacy, and you create something from scratch, as it is the case for Transavia France, which has been created in 2007, you are able finally to build a structure which can be as profitable as what we have in Holland, and the same is true for maintenance.
Even if maintenance is relatively labor-intensive, even if we consider that the taxation on labor is probably higher in France than in the Netherlands, there is a possibility in a group like Air France-KLM to develop in Paris, or mainly in Paris, an activity of maintenance, which is even comparable or a bit more profitable than the counterpart into Amsterdam. Having said that, let's go to the model we have in mind and the target we have in mind concerning the future development of the Air France-KLM Group. Clearly, the fundamental idea of this work is to consider that the margin of Air France has to go a bit closer to the margin of KLM. Keeping in mind that this is a very difficult-to-solve gap of 2.5%.
We consider that there is some margin, some real and strong margin of improvement of the margin into Air France, even more than into KLM. For KLM, the challenge is a bit different. KLM is already quite well-positioned in Europe in terms of profitability and in terms of operation margin, and the challenge is more to continue to stick to such a position among the various European peers. For Air France, it is really an improvement. As explained already by Ben and Anne, we consider that the contribution of Air France to the improvement of the group margin could be, over the period 2019-2024, of the order of magnitude of EUR 900 million. Keep in mind that it is a net contribution, which is that it is considering also that there is inflation, which means that the plans behind such an improvement is far larger than EUR 900 million.
It is really a great effort, which clearly is based on the idea that it is a transformation, a recreation of the model of Air France during this period, which is clearly a challenging target, but we really believe that it is something which is absolutely necessary for the reason explained before. KLM, the contribution is to stick to the 9%-10% of margin that the company has already reached in the past. It is clearly to continue on this strategy, keeping also playing on all what has been acquired during the last year in terms of efficiency of the process, quality of all the relationship with the customers, and development of the new tools in terms of digital, in terms of innovation. Concerning Transavia, we still consider that there is a potential for Transavia, mainly at Orly.
We play the game to have a very strict control of slots concerning the airport of Orly. It gives opportunity for Transavia to continue to develop its presence into Orly. We will see what happen with traffic rights to Algeria after the bankruptcy of Aigle Azur, we hope also that there will be some opportunity for the low-cost company out of Orly. You heard recently, some minutes ago, the plan to open new base out of the French province, and the name of Montpellier has been given by Ben. You have the split of the contribution around the simplifications, the fleet renewal, the revenue, a mix optimization. Fleet renewal, we really believe in that. Probably Air France is a bit late compared to KLM concerning the renewal of the fleet, we are still the 340.
There is the 380, that after some hesitation, we have decided to phase out. We are also convinced that the deal we have, the MOU today with Airbus concerning the A220s providing a very good cost base for the future medium haul activity into Air France. As Ben said, there is still discussion concerning the possible choice between the 350 or the 787 in order to partly compensate the phase out of the 380. As I said before, it is mainly what we name simplification focus, which is the largest contribution to the improvement of the margin of Air France. A lot of things are behind that. It clearly a big challenge for Anne. Again, this net EUR 400 million have to also be considered as compensating for inflation. In terms of time path, it is, of course, a regular evolution between now and 2024.
We see already in 2021 some of the impact, clearly the fleet renewal impact will come a bit later after 2022, when we will have introduced the first Airbus A220 and progressively increase the fleet of A350/787, and when the A380 are phased out. For KLM, again, I don't say that it is easier, but at least the level today is clearly more satisfactory than what we have in Air France. The problem is more to compensate for the risk of inflation and, of course, always stronger competition. For that, the plan built by the KLM teams is built under or focusing on the cost and operational excellence, even the result of KLM are extremely good today. The fleet renewal, with especially the Embraer 195. They will enter the fleet, as Pieter said, in 2021.
Revenue mix optimization with the same as Air France, a timeline which is relatively progressive between 2020 and 2024, and with ultimately the target to maintain mid-cycle margin of 9%-10%, 2.5 above Air France, but together with Air France, of course, contributing to the improvement of the group situation. Behind that, it's clear that the CapEx in fleet is something which is contributing significantly to the improvement of the margin of the group over the period and to the sustainability of the group margin over the period. In average, we have in mind that the CapEx between 2020 to before could be around EUR 4 billion a year. By the way, this CapEx take into account the very, very good hedging portfolio we have concerning aircraft.
We valued all the options we have concerning the acquisition of aircraft being protected against the dollar at something which is around EUR 400 million. EUR 4 billion of CapEx as an average, but under the assumption that we reduce significantly the percentage of leased aircraft. Which means that take that really as a way to calculate the CapEx. We suppose that during the period, we reduce the percentage of leased aircraft from 44% to 33%. Which means that if, of course, we will just decide to keep at the same level this percentage, the level of CapEx will be far less. You recognize perhaps my admiration for IFRS 16, which had forced airline to treat on the same way leased and full-owned aircraft.
Which means that for me, and I already repeated that to you many times, the most important KPI now is not so much the CapEx but far more the adjusted net debt on EBITDA, which is globalizing both the leased aircraft and the owned aircraft. In fact, when we look at the plan as we have built it is more CapEx calculated according to the way I just indicated. It is reducing the percentage of leased aircraft. It is making, of course, a fleet younger at the end of the period, but it is keeping the adjusted net debt on EBITDA ratio around 1.5. It could be probably a bit higher than 1.5 for Air France. It will be a bit lower than 1.5 for KLM.
In total, during the period, we continue to be focused on leverage, which is maintaining the group in the situation to be investment grade alike. We think that all what we have done during the last year has been extremely important, to move from five to 1.5. The idea, clearly, is not to enter in a period where suddenly we will leave the control of this very important ratio. Which means that if you look at the evolution of the group in a very synthetic way, you see that the adjusted free cash is positive. Sorry, the operating free cash is positive, but the adjusted operating free cash, according to IFRS 16, can be negative at the beginning of the period.
Even during all the period, we maintain the adjusted net debt on EBITDA below or around 1.5, and probably even better than that at the end of the period. The idea is clear. Clearly, the group has probably under-invested between the period 2009, 2015. Sometimes some of you made the remark during road shows that the CapEx was below the depreciation, and some of you indicated to me that it was not a sustainable situation, and I agree with that. We cannot have, during a long period, a company which is investing less than the depreciation. We consider that today with the plan we have concerning the fleet simplicity into KLM, and the program of Air France, consisting to phase out the 380, the 340, and to focus on aircraft with a smaller gauge, is something which is consistent with the strategy of market, as explained by Ben.
Even if this strategy needs some investment, we will continue to be clearly with a strict control of the leverage of the group. In terms of capacity, altogether, these fleet plans are supporting the ideas of the group. Capacity will increase between 2% and 3% per year, including Transavia. If you look for Air France and KLM for the period 2019, 2022, you see that even the growth in Air France will be lower than into KLM, 5% compared to 10% of versus prior 2019, 2022. Important also, the fact that in terms of gauge of the fleet, the gauge of the fleet in Air France is supposed to reduce a bit, when the gauge in KLM is supposed to increase a bit, which is clearly the reflect of the two strategic orientation given by both Anne and Pieter.
In KLM, there is a constraint on capacity at Schiphol, you have to try to have a bit larger aircraft. In Air France, with the end of the 380 and the focus on the improvement of the margin, it is the strategy to have aircraft with a slightly smaller size compared to what we had before. In terms of cost control, we have built this plan and all the action behind in order to target cost reduction of -1% per year. Two remarks. First, inflation is increasing in Europe, which means that to reduce unit cost by 1% or 1.5% when inflation is 0.5% is relatively easy. When inflation is 1% or 2%, it is, of course, not possible.
You have also to consider the -1, also that it is a -1 in the context when you see inflation increasing a bit compared to what it was during the period 2012, 2015. We were below 1% quite often during this past period. Now, if you look for the future, we are not living in an environment where the inflation is between 1% and 2%. I really insist on that. It is -1%, but it is in a context where inflation is higher than in the years before. Second, if you try to compare that to the competitors, keep in mind that we compute this inflation at constant fuel cost, which means that on base of the cost we take, we take all the costs, including the fuel costs. Some of the competitors are doing the unit cost evolution excluding fuel cost.
When you do the balance between the methodology, it has, of course, a significant impact. Shareholder dividend. What do we think? We are sticking to what I explained to the market in 2017. It was a bit of a complex sentence. Complex that I have to read it again. If we will one day generate again a profit at the level of 2017, then the question of a dividend became relevant. I continue to maintain this approach in the sense that, yes, we know that we are really focused during the past period on the de-leveraging of the group. Instead of paying dividend, it's true, we are first reduce the debt or the adjusted net debt.
Speaking again with some of you, probably not all of you, but at least some of you, sometimes people told me that we are right, in fact, to focus first on the de-leveraging of the group before to considering paying a dividend. Having said that, if I look at the trajectory we propose to you today, it's clear that it opens the road to enter one day in a more strict and consistent dividend policy. We could consider as soon as the operating result is more than EUR 1.9 billion, it should be normal and wishable to pay to shareholders a dividend of the order of magnitude of 25% of the underlying after-tax profit. Again, this approach is consistent to what I explained to you some years ago in 2018.
As a conclusion, a strong commitment of the group and the management to improve the margin over the cycle for the group Air France-KLM. Behind that, even stronger commitment, and I know it's not easy, of the Air France management, but it will be, of course, an Air France-KLM approach. To reduce and to bring back the margin of Air France at a level closer to the margin of KLM, considering that this gap is not opening the way to the sustainability and the capability of the group to work in an efficient way. We have absolutely to reduce that gap to come back to the situation we had years ago. For that, a lot of work and a lot of plans are already ongoing into Air France.
Third, we are clearly moving from a period where the level of CapEx was relatively limited and probably a bit too low. We have today plan, which I will say rational, efficient in order to contribute thanks to the renewal of the fleet, to the improvement of the Air France-KLM margin. Even if we consider that these new investment are needed, we are not leaving our strategy to continue to maintain our net debt on EBITDA circa 1.5. If I speak still 12 seconds, I will be exactly on time. Okay. Thank you very much.
Okay. Thank you all for listening to all of our presentations. Before we start the Q&A, I just want to point out the rest of our executive team who are in the room with me here at the group level. We have Anne-Sophie Le Lay, who's here in the first row. She's our Corporate Secretary. We have Pieter Bootsma and Patrick Alexandre, who run our commercial division. We have Jean-Christophe Lalanne, who runs our IT. We have Anne Brachet, who runs our maintenance and engineering. I've already pointed out Janet. Who else is here? I think, have I missed anybody? We have Angus Clarke, who is our Head of Strategy. Okay. Why don't we move over here and we can start the Q&A.
While our four speakers are taking place for the Q&A session, I would like to quickly remind you the rules of this exercise, but I know and I guess that most of you are very familiar with them. Would you please state your name and the name of your institution, before asking your question, so those who do not know you, but more importantly, those following us via the webcast, will know who is speaking. Our Q&A session is now planned for 50 minutes. In order to maximize the opportunity for you to interact with the management team, I would kindly invite you to limit yourself to two questions. I say two, but I know that all of you will negotiate for a third one.
Let's open this session, and Wouter van Beek from our IR team in the room, and our staff in uniform, will reach you with the mics.
Jarrod?
Thanks. It's Jarrod Castle from UBS. I will limit it to two. Firstly, have these plans been shared with the unions? Also, can you talk a little bit about how you see the evolution of staff numbers, between now and 2024? Secondly, you spoke a bit about consolidation. Can you put some metrics behind it and linking to that, what you'd be looking for, obviously IAG with Air Europa, et cetera, isn't something you've done. Question, why not? Thanks.
Okay, first part, on the Air France side of the business with the employees, every strategy that you saw here today has been spoken extensively, with staff. Big part of this has been developed with our staff. The removal of the ASK metric or the evolution of the ASK metric, the Air France pilot contract, to explain what that would unleash, took a long time to build the trust and confidence to get our pilots to change that metric. It's been in place for a very long time, and without trust, there was absolutely zero desire on their part to change that. To explain what benefits that would provide Air France, we did get an overwhelming majority of pilots endorse that plan.
For the full efficiency of the fleet that's coming into Air France, so the A350s and the cabin refurbishment that we'll be going through on the remaining 777s, the new cabin agreement that Anne mentioned will really help us optimize where our staff work onboard the airplane and how we can fully configure the airplanes without some of the real restrictions we had in the past. Limiting the size of business cabins to ensure there wasn't a punitive hit if you added two or three seats. An example would be our 777-300ERs with 42 business class seats. Just to get it up to 43 seats would be very punitive. A lot of improvements there, and that, of course, took a lot of discussions with the cabin crew. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to go through the whole list.
I won't do that right now, but if you want to speak after with Anne or myself, this has been a 13-month exercise to make sure that all of these plans are well understood. I think that's been a big change at Air France, is having the staff integrated in all of these decisions. If you look at the history of labor relations at Air France, they have not been great. Last year, a strike of EUR 335 million. To go from that to, as Anne said, over 20 contracts being signed in the last 12 months, I think, is a huge achievement by the team. I think is a great example of what we plan to achieve with the Air France team going forward. In terms of staff levels, there's aircraft getting smaller Air France growing, KLM also growing. It goes up and down.
What are we going to do with Alitalia? What are we going to do with Amadeus? I'll let both Anne and Pieter perhaps go into more detail, at each one of the business units, on what we're doing there, each one of the brands. Then, of course, at Transavia France, as we grow, we'll be looking to hire more people there. Just a quick note on consolidation before I pass it off to Pieter and Anne. Yes, with the announcement of IAG's purchase of Air Europa, currently Air France-KLM does have a joint venture signed with Air Europa. We'll see how that develops. We also have an extensive partnership with GOL. With what's recently been announced, obviously, it has big implication on antitrust and competition.
We'll be following that, and we have a lot of comments, and we'll be involved in those negotiations. Of course, with the 20% investment in LATAM by our partner Delta, that also does change and open up opportunities for us on that front. Perhaps, Pieter, you can start with KLM and then in terms of the staff numbers. Whatever else you want to mix in with that question.
Well, to your point on the staff numbers, if we see what we did over the last couple of years, and you could see that on my slides, we have had a roughly 25%-30% growth in ASK. We actually do have pretty similar number of staff today as we had a couple of years ago. It's partly productivity and it's partly reallocation of some of our staff. Some of the efficiencies we have achieved on the ground, for example, all the automated check-in, all the self-service drop-off machines, all the investments we have done in cargo sort machine, basically, these staff have been either reallocated or new staff have been hired. Going forward, we'll probably have a somewhat less ambitious growth trajectory in terms of movements, as we know the situation at Schiphol, but with larger aircraft, we'll continue to grow.
Our strategy here is going to be we move forward in the very same line. We invest in that staff where it makes sense, profitable growth, some of our engineering and maintenance staff. Where things are obsolete or change, we will address it locally as we did for the last couple of years.
Yes. On the Air France side, we are detailing the project we have in the transformation plan. The big ones are obviously shared with the unions and the staff because we want this peaceful dialogue to go on and to build a strategy with the trust of the people. We are presenting the detailed program in the work councils that we have. Regarding the number of staff, you know that we've decreased the total number of staff in Air France by 10,000 people in the past year. I think the opportunity we have is that the decrease on FTE is natural departures are quite high in each population. The dynamic, of course, will be different. Regarding overheads, we have frozen hirings this year, and we want to decrease and to follow at least the natural departure.
On the operational side, since we grow from 2% to 3% per year, we still need some hirings. We've hired, I think, 800 people this year in maintenance, in cabin crew, on the pilot side, and also on the ground staff at Charles de Gaulle. Not everywhere. You've seen that we have a voluntary departure plan to decrease in the French station where the activity is decreasing. When we build a project that brings more efficiency in terms of productivity, of course, it's only to decrease the hiring in operation. I think that it's quite easy to deliver regarding the employment problem.
Can you stand up to the mic? Sure.
Hi, good morning. It's Daniel from Bernstein Research. Maybe if I could address my first question to Pieter and Frédéric. You've been around for a bit of time. You saw the last strategic program too, which had similar characteristics as this one. What's different this time? Then maybe to Ben and Anne, the EBIT increase is great, but that, of course, also is something unions will see. What's your take on increasing EBIT and keeping it for investors in the end, or for CapEx or for net debt reduction and not having unions bargain for an increased share of that profit?
Difficult to say what is different.
Personally, I see a big difference, which is that when the plan has been launched, let us say that the social situation into Air France was totally different. In the sense that the relationship with the main pilot union were extremely difficult. It was at that time, to be frank, not possible to speak about strategy with part of the direction of the SNPL.
To today, I think that after all the action described already by Ben and by Anne, we are concerning Air France in a situation where the quality of the dialogue is so much better, which means that when you speak about a plan, it is not seen immediately as something which is not to be accompanied by unions, but it is seen as something which can be discussed, explained, negotiated sometimes, but which is seen by unions and by the social body of Air France in a more positive way than before. For me, it is clearly the big difference. The two former plans have been launched in a really hectic ambiance, if I may. I don't say that the work is easy today, but at least for me, it is a big difference.
Maybe before Pieter talks specifically about KLM. I think a big change is the strategies and the objectives that we outlined here today for you have all been discussed at length with our social partners, as opposed to some of the strategies in the past, which were put forward and then discussed after the fact with, in particular, the main pilot union at Air France. This is a complete reversal so that we don't have to put something out, we haven't decided to put something out, and then go negotiate it. We've done that ahead of time. Anything else to add? Okay. The second part of the question. Where's the gentleman? I can't see him here. Is the incremental margin that we're targeting and risks that we may face with unions looking to get a larger share.
It's very clear that the teams throughout the group, not just at Air France, but also at KLM and Transavia, see what's going on with our competition, know that if the group is not more successful in terms of bottom line and is not able to attract shareholders, that the group will not be successful, and that has a direct impact on the future of their job. This has been a huge win, I think, for the group to actually hear the labor leaders speak like that. Of course, when you have many years of acrimonious relationships, you can't turn that overnight. I'll give you an example.
When we had this opportunity in France with the failure of Aigle Azur, the amount of effort that the SNPL pilot leadership put into creating flexibility over and above what had already been negotiated to try, if possible, to make a purchase or a merger make sense, was great to see. The incremental slots that came about at Orly, our pilots did not want to see those go to a competitor. Despite the fact that the labor laws in France made it impossible to go forward on that transaction, I was pleasantly surprised to see the amount of initiatives coming out from the SNPL. It was great to see.
If I may answer to the question that was not directed to me on the strategy. I think a big difference is that in this new strategy, we want to fix the basics. The basics, it's simplification of the brand, simplification of the fleet, and the efficiency of the LOPA of the cabin configuration. When you look at the amount of money, the amount of cost that you avoid with this kind of simplification, and the fact that you don't have to negotiate so much, it's not social measures. I think that there is a big difference with the strategies.
Ksenia Kharitonova with Cap Research. Two questions, please. First, there is a strong correlation between passenger satisfaction, Skytrax ranking of airlines, and their major airports. KLM is supported by an airport which is relatively highly ranked as the brands of Lufthansa. What is your view on optimization potential at Charles de Gaulle? What is your view on terminal 4 in its current design? Second, do you plan some changes with respect to reporting, such that over the next years, we will be able to track progress that you are doing on targets highlighted today? Thank you.
The experience at Roissy, I'll let Anne take that part of your question, and I'll just briefly make some comments about the new terminal 4 project at Charles de Gaulle. This is a great opportunity for Air France to help design a new terminal that can be optimized for the operations of Air France and its partners. It is a very long-term project. The estimated time to complete the final phase is 15-17 years from now. What's extremely important for us is that we are not negatively impacted during this long transition.
This delay from first opening of 2024 to 2028, has been in part because of our insistence that the first phase is either at the level that we have today or an improvement of what we have today in terms of connectivity and check-in facilities. That is what has been promised by Aéroports de Paris. On the cost side, we continue to push and lobby very hard that this terminal does not add to what's already a very high-cost airport, and the governance in place is put in a similar way to the most successful airports.
Yeah. I think that some big improvements have been made. I've been in Charles de Gaulle since 1999, so I remember the first Charles de Gaulle, and it has improved a lot. Recently, what has improved is the police frontier with the biometry. Much more fluid. It's also the access by car to the airport, and Ben has pushed a lot to have a better access, and it worked. I think we have some room for improvement. The first one is that all aircraft are handled with jet bridges, that we don't have so many remote aircraft. It's the case now for long haul, but for medium haul, there is room for improvement. What we want with T4 is really to have all these irritants that are fixed.
We're working, and I think we have worked quite well with Aéroports de Paris to modify the first project of T4 in order to have all the aspects of customer experience taken into account.
Maybe I'll just add one other point on Roissy Charles de Gaulle. There is a great opportunity. As the Air France EBIT moves up, in order to add flights, we do have runway capacity. With four runways at Roissy, as opposed to two at Heathrow and the limited activity that is available at Frankfurt, we do have something that is not available at our other two major competition hubs.
Yeah. On your last point, I see that the reporting we do is already extremely precise, and it can easily indicate the evolution of the KPI I have just given during the presentation and the plan. If you need something additional, we will do it, but I think that we are not planning to change dramatically the presentation of our result as it is today, because we think it's relatively well complete, and it will be sufficient, we think, for you to follow the existing reporting. Okay. I take the point. I don't know. I will tell you.
Okay, thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you. Neil Glynn from Credit Suisse. If I could ask two questions, please. The first one with respect to Anne, maybe following on from other questions on incentivization. We've seen examples at other businesses within this industry, as well as other industries, where the first couple of years are easier. There's a lot of motivation, a lot of enthusiasm. Obviously from an Air France point of view, in particular, the base is low. I'm just interested from a structural perspective, how do you envisage tackling when, let's say, the group gets to EUR 1.5 billion operating profit, and it becomes a lot more difficult to use some of the messages today as effectively to keep on that journey to structurally improve the margin sustainably?
For example, at EUR 1.5 billion operating profit, clearly the concern as to competing for investment, the concern on cash flow generation would be considerably lower today. How do you think about incentivization? A second question for Pieter. I guess KLM's margins peaked a couple of years ago. Just interested in terms of how you view 2019, where the margin was down about 3 points year-on-year in the nine months. Do we need, or should we see recovery in 2020 to kickstart the path to getting back to 9%-10%? I would just like to get some clarity as to where the real baseline is for KLM to think about the future.
Regarding the incentivization, I think that we will renegotiate our profit-sharing agreement at the end of this year, the topic is burning. I think that for the moment, it's quite clear that everyone is motivated by the fact to recover our margin and to get back to profit sharing. As you say, it maybe will be difficult, I hope, in three, four or five years. We are also focusing on incentives on, for example, ancillaries, so that each one contributing to these ancillaries, to these upgrades, to these seat sellings, et cetera. We see that the share of ancillaries is growing, that we can also retribute, on the short term, the people that make it possible. We've just, I think, finalized an agreement with ground staff on this kind of incentivization.
The profit sharing, I think that the past agreement was quite okay, generous, and we will have to see what we can do in the future regarding the level and the ramp-up of the margin.
To add to that, before I answer your second question to me, I think we are in that situation where the margins indeed have gone up, staff could benefit and profit with it from our profit-sharing mechanism. I think the introduction of a profit-sharing mechanism has really helped us to sort of keep a momentum and keep focus and keep enthusiasm in moving forward. At the same time, we cannot completely disconnect discussions about salary, about what's going on overall in the market. If we see the overall salary increase in the Netherlands for the last
two to three years, it's very different than the situation which was there five years ago. We can never completely disconnect the world we live in, and as KLM, we're the second-largest private employer of the country, whatever is happening in national salaries is affecting our discussion as well. Again, here, the two perspectives of profit sharing, one, and working for a flourishing company which can invest in the future, which can invest in people, which can invest in digitization, which can invest in mobility, is really, I think, one of the key assets in keeping that motivation high. Frédéric warned me before we were sitting here today, "Don't make any forward-looking statements." I listened to the CFO when it comes to giving any indication for next year's results.
I think it's fair to say, looking at the presentation we're giving, that some of the initiatives which were in the KLM breakdown of improvements will start to kick in next year. Yes, we'll have more new 787s coming in, which should be help of our fleet renewal program. Two, we do have an extensive program in order to have a better operational performance in 2020 than we had in 2019. Again, the weather we cannot influence, but some of the Schiphol disruptions should be dealt with in a much better way in 2020. I think we have all the actions in place in order to make sure that this level which we have achieved in the last two years, and indeed we're a bit lower now, we continue, and precisely in the presentation of Frédéric, it's our ambition to continue on that same trajectory.
Thank you.
Laurent?
Laurent Ineich, AXA Investment Managers. You didn't mention what could bring the fact that you lower the share of GDS and that you are doing more direct sales on especially the RASK improvement. Could it be meaningful? Heard from other carriers that on special routes, by example in Switzerland, that RASK could be improved with this kind of a shift by a meaningful amount.
Yeah, we didn't attach a specific target or number to improving our direct sales. What we're focusing on here is the improvement in ancillary revenues, that the ability to grow ancillary revenues goes up, the correlation with the increase of direct sales because of our ability to showcase our entire product offering. When you're in a GDS environment, or what's going through to third parties that are dependent on that type of display, it's price driven. For our two main brands, KLM and Air France, this is not the best way for us to sell. I think that's the angle that we're looking at.
Anything that we can add over and above the base ticket price is the improvement in RASK, and if we can get customers to come directly to us so we can showcase it and put it on the shelf, as we say appropriately, that is the increase. That's why you see the example there of ancillary revenues going way up. Of course, there's the actual cost component, the sale cost on the CASK side, which will come down when it's obviously coming to us directly, is much cheaper.
Hi, it's Andrew Lobbenberg here from HSBC. I think already today we've heard a lot of interest in the room about understanding how sustainable the changed social environment is. Is there a role there for extended contracts, which I think was something you used in Air Canada? Or does that become impossible in the European context? A question on Transavia, if I may, and the growth of Transavia France. You're announcing Montpellier today, and you're talking about potential to go into other French provincial airports. In terms of the competitive environment, operating out of Orly is magical and slot constrained. Whereas in the French provinces, you're going against the melée of every blooming low-cost carrier there is in Europe, including some who weren't there very recently. How is that not going to be detrimental to your margin at Transavia going into head-butting fights in the provinces?
Okay. Two very good questions. The first one, what we managed to achieve at Air Canada in terms of coming to three 10-year agreements with pilots, cabin crew, and ground. These were actually not 10-year agreements. They were three-year agreements that automatically renewed if certain metrics were met. It was the pilots who drove it at Air Canada. Once we had the agreement there on the pilot side, they really set a great example for the rest of the team on ensuring that alignment was the only way to move forward. If you look at the market share or the market valuation of Air Canada today, it went from EUR 300 million to EUR 12 billion in the space of 10 years. Very happy with that. Here in Europe, in particular France, there's no expectation we're going to get a 10-year deal with the pilots here.
I think full alignment, especially with the largest pilot union and hopefully with all three unions we have at Air France, we believe we can achieve. The pilots here, as I said when I first started, are unbelievably passionate, totally in love with the brand Air France. Do want to see it regain its position within the group and within Europe as one of the best. I think we'll have to do it in more innovative ways, in a different way than what my experience has in the past.
I think it's the same base characteristics from what I witnessed in my previous role was if you can get trust, respect, transparency, and do it in a confidential way, we are already totally aligned with all the staff at both major airlines, and in particular, Air France, who see the margin where it is, see the fact there hasn't been growth, see the fact that we have over 100 competitors at both Paris airports, that they see that the business is going elsewhere. On your second point, at Orly, with the redesign of the hub operation, with the removal of the most inefficient aircraft types and with the ability now to grow Transavia, we have some clear, I think, low risk plans that should definitely drive margin.
In the secondary cities, even though access is available to our competitors, and there already are quite a few that have big operations there, what we have that they don't have is for the customer base that's in France, a lot of them fly Air France or KLM today and are Flying Blue members. This is a unique advantage that we have over the competitors in those secondary cities, and we will better use the ability to leverage that tool as we grow Transavia France.
Hi, it's James Hollins from Exane BNP Paribas. Two from me, please. I just find it very interesting that Transavia France margin is higher than that in Transavia Holland. I was wondering what could be learned from that, as clearly you try and bridge that delta to the best you can within Air France versus KLM in particular, and indeed what might be learned from improving the margin in Transavia Holland. Then back to that previous point. I certainly would like an update on the next negotiations, particularly with the Air France pilots. For me, it's fairly binary as to whether this new strategy works, whether you have that buy-in, and clearly I'm not going to sit here and say you haven't done a good job of getting that buy-in so far.
As far as I can tell that the deal ends pretty soon, it was kind of a stopgap deal, which now we need to look at the next two, three-year period, ideally next five-year period. Just wondering where we are in the negotiations. Obviously, we've seen in BA people saying, "We want massive profit shares because we had to take the pain when times were tougher." I don't think anyone would say Air France haven't been through that as well. Maybe just a broad update or specifically where we are on negotiations. Thank you.
Perhaps I'll let Pieter answer the first part on Transavia Holland, and how it's managed slightly different from a different perspective in terms of slot optimization at Amsterdam and how the balance of earnings gets looked at in a different way as opposed to Transavia France.
If we look to the operation of Transavia in the Netherlands, as I showed on my slide, they are operating out of Amsterdam, Eindhoven, and Rotterdam, and the vast majority of the operation is out of Amsterdam. 28 out of the 40 aircraft is Amsterdam. The other eight and nine are from Rotterdam and Eindhoven respectively. If we look to the overall yield situation, that is obviously a little bit better in Amsterdam than outside Amsterdam. I think the results between Transavia France and Transavia the Netherlands are pretty similar, maybe 1% margin difference or something like that, but pretty similar, and I guess are more driven by route network, sort of individual routes optimized rather than a very structural differentiation. They use the same aircraft types. They have a pretty similar utilization, similar structure. A lot of back offices are completely aligned.
If we look to a place like Porto, which is served out of both Orly and Amsterdam, it's a completely shared resources. I think it's pretty similar. I don't know, Nathalie, if I forget a very important topic, but I would say it's pretty similar there.
Okay. Your second question about the next contract with pilots. The tough negotiation we had over the last year, ensuring we get as much alignment as possible for the NAO that covered for the pilots 2018 and 2019. We've already pre-negotiated 2020, so it's done well ahead of the deadline.
Hi, Carolina Dores from Morgan Stanley. I guess you've run through it that you're comfortable with your negotiations with the employees. I guess in your opinion, Ben, what is the main challenge of your delivering this plan? I guess my second question is when we look into, because if you're giving a very long-term path to 2024, and in Air France, we got a fair bit of hints of how to think about it. If my math is right, are we fair to say EBIT improvements of around EUR 150 million for a year for the initial years, and then it accelerates into 2024?
We gave, for the mid-cycle, a large target there, 7%-9%, sorry, 7%-8%, more than half of the business operating in a very expensive environment here in France. As I said, we are lobbying very hard to lower or create a more level playing field. We're not counting on that. Many people ask us why can we not get the Air France business to the same margin levels of KLM or even others. This is a big challenge for us. To grow from the margin that Air France is at today up to the margin that we are targeting is doable. We believe is doable, but it is not possible at Air France without alignment with staff.
If you go back the last six, seven years, over EUR 1 billion in cost for strikes, and not having alignment to a strategy going forward with something like this, as Frédéric mentioned, if we do not have alignment with the Air France staff, which I think if you've seen over the last year, I think it's surprised everybody at Air France. We're really proud of what we've been able to accomplish. Now we have stability. You cannot reverse many years of lack of trust. Based on what's been achieved over the last year, we're on a great momentum, and I think we'll be able to continue it. Your specific question about how much can we realize each year, we are spreading it out evenly over the five-year period here, and obviously going to move as quickly as we can.
Hi, Ben. Stephen Furlong from Davy Research. You talked about competition and for the plan, did you look at the underlying supply or demand capacity additions of competitors that you've done before at the 2024? Then the other thing, just in terms of consolidation, I was wondering, because you mentioned that North America is obviously more consolidated than Europe. Would you look at your net debt EBITDA target, and that 5%, or if an opportunity arose, would you be prepared to raise that? Or is really Air France-KLM taking part significantly or meaningfully in consolidation? Maybe it's down the road, 2024 or beyond that. Thank you.
Start with the consolidation one. Look, where it makes financial sense and strategically where it makes sense, we will participate. Transavia lifting of the cap, it's not consolidation, but it's a great tool for us to do things that we couldn't do in the past. As I said, with Flying Blue is a great platform, with only being slot constrained. We have an incredible opportunity there. The fact that Amsterdam is slot constrained does provide an unbelievable opportunity for quality of revenue improvement.
As you said, for the supply and demand impact on Air France-KLM, because of the well-diversified networks that we have, and especially on the Air France side, with the new flexibility we have to go after the markets where we make money, the diversification and the opportunities that were not in place before position the group in a much stronger way to be able to weather the ups and downs as opposed to be straightjacket locked into a certain way of doing business.
I think we're in a much more flexible position, not only in terms of being able to take advantage of connections or more origin and destination traffic, but with the new configurations we're putting in place within the group, and especially with the overhaul of the fleet at Air France, to be able to alter the size of the business cabin larger or smaller without having to go through lengthy negotiations. The way we're positioning all the monuments on board the aircraft being done in a way that we can quickly change the size of each one of those cabins gives us more flexibility that we didn't have in the past.
Hi, Savi Syth from Raymond James here. First question is on the kind of going after more local traffic with Air France. Just curious, do you capture that by upgauging and keeping your connecting traffic, or is there a change in strategy on how you deal with the connecting traffic? The second question on the margin, it's a good margin for KLM, the target, but kind of curious what keeps you from maybe trying to achieve a low to mid-teen margin that you see some other carriers achieving? A little bit tied to that, I'm curious why the Transavia Holland versus Transavia France doesn't have that 2 to 2.5 point difference in margin that you see between Air France and KLM.
On the traffic mix, specifically for Air France, a big portion of that, as I mentioned in the first part of the presentation, was not available because of, believe it or not, contract restrictions. To position the airline, the airplane types, A380s, getting rid of those airplanes, the way the interiors were configured, made it very, very difficult to fly a schedule that was optimal for local traffic, because you're designing the banks around filling up big A380s, not having the right cabins to go after the local segments where it made sense. A lot of restrictions around laying out the fleet and the network to optimize the types of flows where Air France does best. Being in this business for 30 years, when I arrived here, looking at all of the constraints that were in place, we couldn't move.
We still have some constraints, but to be able to step by step, go through each one, ensure that the social partners that have an impact on that understand that there is a positive opportunity that's created by evolving these contracts is what's driving our view and our target to be able to shift to those more profitable segments.
The second part of the question is a very good one. The first one was good also, the second one is a There is many explanation. First, for example, there is not domestic network Air France had and KLM has not. Second, there is also the fact that Transavia is a younger company in France than in Holland. Transavia France has been created in 2007 and in Holland?
51 years ago.
51. Which means that all the legacy argument, which means that you lose a bit in terms of efficiency, people are a bit older and a bit higher in the scale of revenue, et cetera, is explaining the fact that when you compare today Transavia France and Transavia Holland, it's true that during the last two years, the profitability was exactly the same, around nine point something%. It's not true in 2019, where Transavia France is a bit below Transavia Holland, it's due for the problem of inoperations made by Transavia France during the summer. Clearly, it is an illustration that it is not only the environment, but also the history of each company. It is also demonstration that even in France you can have low-cost, working not so bad with the margin equivalent to Air Dutch sister.
Hi, it's Jamie Robathan from Deutsche Bank. Two questions from me. The first relates to the domestic network restructuring, and the new Orly strategy, which are clearly related and seem to represent an important part of the building block. Alongside the removal of some loss-making regional services and the scope for additional, hopefully profitable Transavia France services, there was, I think, a third element mentioned, which was for Air France to offer medium-haul business-orientated services to places like Madrid. Is there a specific figure within the bridge you'd attach to that opportunity, and who will you be competing with there, and will you be freeing up any slots at Charles de Gaulle, for example?
The second question, Ben, are there any restrictions still in place in terms of the industrial agreements, which, if removed or altered, could give you even more commercial flexibility? Are you completely done on that front? Thanks.
Yeah. On the new business-orientated European destination that we will open, the first one is Madrid next summer. I think it's not the same initiative that we've done in the past. We have launched European destination, but it was more in the middle of the day, not targeting business customers. This one is really targeting business customers with very good frequencies, very good timings for business customers. Of course, we can use valued slots from Orly, and we also want to highlight the fact that Orly is transformed to a very convenient airport. That the area around Orly is a much wealthy area, and that Parisian people often prefer to go directly to Orly Airport. It will be linked quite conveniently to Paris with a metro line, with the station of Massy, if you know it, to the high-speed train.
We're saying that the refurbishment of Orly offers really good opportunities, and that we don't want to compete with Charles de Gaulle network. We will choose some destination where the frequencies we have in Charles de Gaulle are already high, and we will just add up this kind of route for the convenience of the customers that will prefer Orly.
The other question that you asked regarding additional removal or evolution of the contracts that we have in place, there's an enormous amount that's in front of us. I'll just give you a few examples. At the airport, our ground staff, the rostering system that is not efficient, a lot of work going on there. Pilots, the training plan is probably one of the longest, if not the longest in the world. The productivity of our pilots, because of the types of programs we have in place. A lot of the rules around how we roster our pilots and the cabin crew at Air France are also very restrictive, and in a lot of cases do not benefit our staff. These are just a few examples of the many examples that we've got to make Air France more efficient.
I'll let Pieter talk about KLM there from that front. I do want to say that the most important ones, being able to remove that ASK metric or evolve that ASK metric as part of the production balance at Air France, was so necessary in order to make the right fleet decisions and ensure we could configure the airplanes correctly. Because if you saw in the presentation the value that comes out of that, to be able to buy the airplane that makes most sense, and if you look, the timing is amazing right now. If you look at wide-body airplanes, the market price from last year is down 30%. We couldn't be in a better environment to replace the airplanes. The fact that we had not overhauled the interiors of the A380s. To get this aligned at this point, was really key.
Now, not to discount the other options and opportunities for us in evolving the contracts, but that was the number 1 item we wanted to get through.
Michael Kuhn from Société Générale. Two basically follow-ups. One more on cabin, as it is such an important topic. What do you think is the current, let's say, financial disadvantage of operating suboptimal cabin layouts? Until when do you expect to fix that issue? That said, what profit uplift do you expect from that isolated measure to be able to operate tailor-made cabin layouts to the right destinations? That's the first one. Secondly, on lobbying efforts again. Clearly, this is not a new topic, and I think also your predecessors have often complained about the disadvantage of the operating environment in France. Still, for example, into next year, we will see a new eco-tax as an additional burden for your operation here. It seems there's lots of headwinds against the industry, and it's not really in a good lobbying position right now.
What do you think can change there going forward, and in which areas do you expect to get some progress on improving your operating environment from a political perspective? Thank you.
I'll answer the second question first. I think the fact that we have stability on the social side at Air France, puts us in a much more credible position when it comes to lobbying with the French government. When Air France has been in crisis and focused on daily fires, the ability to go to the French government and push an agenda on the value of better supporting or creating a more level playing field in France would've been much more challenging than we are in today. That's a big change. The reception we're getting, although it hasn't produced the type of change that we would like or to the level that we'd like, the interest and desire to understand what it is going to take to get Air France to produce and perform at a higher level, is there from our government partners.
On your first question, I don't want to take up too much time on it because it's a very lengthy answer, so I'll try to compile it into the few key points. Over half of the Air France fleet today has uncompetitive products. What I mean by that is, if you look at the A380s, if you look at half of the 777 fleet, we do not have even the basic lie-flat product, which all major international carriers that fly into and out of France have. There's a massive effort to go forward on that as quickly as possible. We have 12 777-300ERs that fly some of the most important routes out of Paris, that still have the old product. Of course, the A380 is the same. We're almost finished with the A330.
The cabin configuration and getting that standardized in order to ensure the value proposition is well understood and can be counted on, will drive improved margins. On our five flights a day to JFK today, one out of Orly and four out of CDG, we have 3 different types of seat. If you're trying to switch a Business Class seat on that route there, you're not going to be happy if you go from an expectation of a flat seat to one that's on an angle, and we risk losing those customers, or these customers are not satisfied because of something as basic as that. Getting the product consistent, making sure it's positioned correctly. This is why you've seen the removal of the brand Hop and the removal of the brand of Joon.
As Anne described, the introduction of business class in domestic France, because we do derive a lot of profitable long-haul premium cabin revenue out of domestic France to ensure that that is an end-to-end product. We do have a lot of business customers flying on the La Navette routes. The hourly routes we have out of Orly to Nice, to Marseille, and to Toulouse. These routes are still, of the domestic routes that we fly, are the strongest ones. I would say consistency is necessary, and they're not unique to Air France. All of you fly long haul, I'm sure, and you're not happy if the product's not what you expected. This is an issue we have today because we have a lot of customers who have either shifted from Air France or who are not satisfied with the product.
Financially?
Financially, as I said, when you look at the market share loss, and we see many of our customers that have shifted away from Air France. The quality of revenue in the business cabin, we've attached a target, and you see the €900 million as a breakdown that Anne is showing, basically to configuration and to simplification. We have done that on the assumption that yields remains flat. All that would be upside, as we are able to increase the value of the revenue or the improvement in the revenue production.
Maybe to complete, to add length to a long answer. We are currently refurbishing our A330, 15 aircraft. Next year, our 777 that serves the leisure market, Antilles, et cetera, 12 aircraft. The year after, we will refurbish the 777 that are with a better revenue on the overall aircraft. Because you use more of the space, the overall space on the aircraft. That's why it's bringing benefits to the EUR 900 million.
Maybe just one last point. Even though it's taking a long time, or longer than we would like to renovate these airplanes. Every month, you'll see by next summer, on the key routes to Asia and to North America, if the route only has one flight a day, it will be operated with a product that's been renovated. We are isolating the aircraft that are still in an old configuration on routes where there is no competition or where Air France operates multiple flights a day, so at least there is a choice, a product, so that we can try to steer the lower-yielding revenue to the flights where we don't have the latest product offering. Some of the other traffic that is less valuable to that. We are moving quickly, but we are trying to ensure that our best products are on the best route.
Yeah. At the same time, since we exit the 340, we exit the 380. When you make the math, it's 80% of the fleet that will be at the highest standards next year.
It's now 1:00. Thank you very much for coming. I think we can now close this formal Q&A session. Of course, we welcome you for the lunch, where you will have the opportunity to further exchange with our CEO committee and with the Group Executive Committee members that Ben introduced earlier this morning. Thank you very much for coming.