There's a new airline for hipsters. But not everyone's impressed

What corporate France lacks in cost-cutting potential, it makes up for in style. That at least appears to be the recipe at Joon, the latest aviation brainchild of Air France-KLM Group, which starts operating this week.

The pitch goes like this: tech-savvy and fashion-conscious flight attendants serve de rigueur staples from baobab juice to organic quinoa salad as millennials jet from Paris to Barcelona and Brazil at discount rates, streaming videos above the clouds.

The reality, of course, is slightly less glamorous: the hipster pitch simply sugars the pill. Scratch beneath the surface and Joon, a riff on “jeune,” French for young, is the result of some hard-headed thinking at Europe’s biggest airline, designed to boost earnings by cutting costs more steeply than fares.

At stake is Air France’s ability to defend European routes against further incursions from no-frills specialists led by Ryanair Holdings, while combating an emerging discount challenge in lucrative long-haul markets. Joon represents the group’s second recent bid to slash costs after the first was dropped amid protests that saw managers attacked by staff. Analysts say the company must get the new attempt right before oil prices rebound — or put at risk a resurgence in its business that led operating profit to jump 44 percent in the first nine months and the share price to double as French visitor numbers recover from a spate of terrorist attacks.

“Air France needs to improve its cost performance relative to competitors in order to thrive in an environment that may not be as benign as the one we have today,” said Andrew Lobbenberg, an aviation analyst at HSBC Holdings in London. “That’s what Joon is about.”

The new unit, Air France’s fourth brand alongside the mainline carrier, short-haul unit Transavia and regional arm Hop!, will be based at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport and is set to commence flights on Friday. It will initially serve Barcelona, Berlin, Lisbon and Porto before next year adding more far-flung destinations including the Seychelles and Fortaleza in Brazil, and has applied for US flights. Current union agreements would limit the fleet to 28 planes.

Joon was borne out of a compromise by Air France-KLM Chief Executive Officer Jean-Marc Janaillac, who chose to develop it while backing away from the more overtly cut-price Transavia, which became the focus of clashes that made global headlines and forced out predecessor Alexandre de Juniac.

Where the Transavia plan sought significant concessions from pilots, Joon will pay them as much as Air France does — instead securing savings from the recruitment of new cabin crew who will get 40 percent less than those at the mainline brand. That will reduce expenses by up to 18 percent overall. Ticket prices won’t be in the bargain-basement range, with a one-way trip to Lisbon on January 8 priced from $59), according to Joon’s website. That’s cheaper than previously charged by Air France, which will vacate routes that Joon takes up, but still € 8.74 more than the same journey with EasyJet, Europe’s second-biggest discount carrier and a major force in the French market, and 11 euros higher than charged by Transavia, which will duplicate some of the new carrier’s services.