Business travellers should head to France while the sun shines

With tourists avoiding the football madness, now is a great time to take advantage of new flights and falling hotel prices

Airlines are taking on Eurostar with more routes to Paris (Shutterstock)

France, Germany, Spain: at the time of writing, those teams are the bookies’ favourites to win Euro 2016. They are also three of the four biggest EU trading partners (the fourth of the quartet, Italy, is languishing in seventh place in the bookmakers’ affections).

There is certainly, though, no doubt about the losers from the continent’s four-yearly festival of football. They are the same as for any major sporting tournament: business travellers, and by extension the businesses that depend on them.

On Friday, I checked flights between London and Marseille, where England played their opening game on Saturday evening, returning on Sunday. The good news, according to the fare-comparison website Skyscanner, was that anyone with an urgent need to travel on Friday could do so. The bad news: British Airways’ three flights from Heathrow, and easyJet’s pair from Gatwick, were all full, though on the latter route there were a few seats for Saturday afternoon at £365 one way, though no seats at the Stade Vélodrome for the fixture against Russia.

Skyscanner’s suggested cheapest route (for £341) involved a stop along the way: outbound in Athens, inbound in Istanbul. That gives an indication of how normal travel patterns are damagingly distorted by big events.

The last experience most of us had of this was the London Olympics: a celebration for the nation, a disaster for businesses. Boris Johnston was an “outer” in those days, too. As London mayor, he urged people to stay away from the capital during the 2012 Games. To back him up, Heathrow assured travellers that every seat on every flight to and from the airport would be full on key dates even though all the evidence indicated that forecast was total tosh.

As a prototype for “Project Fear”, the scare tactics for 2012 worked a treat. Business travellers and leisure visitors duly stayed away, and for the first week London was a ghost town.

Paris is the second-most important business city in western Europe, after London. Traditionally things go quiet in July, when a large minority of staff take their annual holiday, and deathly in August when most of the rest are en vacances. This year, the summer shutdown has begun early. What with railway workers and Air France pilots choosing to underline their grievances by striking on the opening weekend, it looks as though only mad dogs, English fans and supporters of Northern Ireland and Wales will stray across the Channel in the coming month.

As a result, it’s a great time to be a business traveller in France - so long as you have people to meet and work to do when you get there.

It may have passed you by, but the number of flights between the UK and Paris has soared this summer. The Air France subsidiary Transavia has launched flights between Luton and Orly airport in the French capital - a preferred gateway for many business travellers. It has also launched services to Paris from Edinburgh, capital of a nation whose interest in Euro 2016 is limited. Add in easyJet’s energetic competition from Luton and Southend to Paris Charles de Gaulle, and the cheeky appearance of Vueling - sibling to BA - between Luton and CDG, and you have a ready-made fares war, with prices around £80 return and frequent services. Sure, Eurostar will still command the lion’s share of services between London and Paris, but with fares stretching almost to £500 the airlines may take back some of the territory surrendered when the Channel Tunnel opened. And with confidence in Paris suffering because of last year’s terrorist outrages, the summer sales at top hotels in the French capital are starting early.

Bon chance, tout le monde.