A seat costing more than 3,000 euros for… two suits. Yes, you read correctly. As revealed by our colleagues from Release, during the presidential trip to Brazil, a member of the Elysée administration reserved a business class plane seat solely to arrange two bags containing Emmanuel Macron’s suits.
Last Saturday, on board an Air France Paris-Rio flight for the Head of State’s visit to Guyana and Brazil from March 25 to 29, two seats had been reserved. One for the stewardship member, the other for two costume covers “carefully placed and duly attached”. “To a hostess who suggests storing these covers in one of the cupboards reserved for this purpose, the person concerned responds in the negative,” explains Release. The costumes will therefore remain on the seat for an 11.5 hour flight.
A usual procedure
According to information obtained by Release, this is a standard procedure. “When we travel with the President’s belongings, we take an “extra seat”,” an Elysee source told the daily.
Libération did the calculations. Air France offers a 25% discount on this additional seat. The average price of an extra seat observed in March on the Air France website is 3,355 euros for a Paris-Rio in business class. It is 912 euros for an economy trip (class in which, according to the same source, the Rio-Paris return journey was made).
In total, the cost of transporting the two presidential costumes is therefore estimated at more than 4,000 euros (round trip) and 2.3 tonnes of CO2 emitted.
Why didn’t these two suits travel, like Emmanuel Macron, aboard the presidential plane? The mystery remains.