Air France Confirms: The Value of the Aviation Sector Is Shifting Toward North America

There are moments when an office occupation is not just a real estate move, but the physical trace of a global strategy in transition. Such is the case of Air France, which in the third quarter of 2025 absorbed roughly 350 sqm in Torre Mapfre on Paseo de la Reforma, where it already occupied more than 3,000 sqm for commercial and operational functions in the country. The expansion does not respond solely to administrative needs, but to a geo-economic repositioning.

Mexico and North America have become Air France-KLM's primary source of revenue outside Europe. This bloc—which includes French Polynesia—generated more than €5 billion (approximately $5.5 billion USD) in the first nine months of 2025, accounting for around one-fourth of the group's global activity, driven by transatlantic routes with strong corporate and leisure demand. Over the same period, the region grew 6.7% year-over-year, the second most dynamic increase in the airline's network, behind only Europe (excluding France) and North Africa, which posted a 7.4% increase.

The company's strong performance is not an outlier, but part of a broader phase shift in the aviation sector. The industry no longer operates under the logic of "recovering what was lost" after the pandemic, but under a dynamic of selective reordering: consolidating profitable routes, adjusting capacity to more stable mobility patterns, and redefining corporate presence in key cities. In this stage, expansion is not measured by volume, but by strategic coherence.

Data shows that after an exceptional rebound of nearly 29% annually between 2021 and 2022, air transport revenues entered a normalization phase. During 2023–2024, sector revenues stabilized at around 200 billion pesos (roughly $11.5 billion USD), and by 2025, a point of equilibrium appears: revenues¹ stop growing in volume because demand, rather than expanding, is being redirected toward higher-yield routes—cross-border, corporate, and hub-to-hub.

This does not imply less activity, but a different discipline: the industry reduces capacity on marginal routes and concentrates it where revenue per available seat (RASK) is higher. Profitability thus stops depending on the total number of passengers and instead rests on route mix, dynamic pricing, and ancillary revenue, consolidating—since 2006—a model that is less expansive, but more stable.

In this context, the value of the sector's fixed assets—fleet, infrastructure, and corporate space—also increases by around 1.5%¹, not necessarily because the size of the operation expands, but because its performance is optimized. In capital-intensive industries such as aviation, asset value is determined by profit-generating capacity adjusted for operating costs and depreciation, rather than by physical scale. This is why corporate space does not expand broadly, but through precise adjustment: only what is necessary to sustain the revenue-producing operation is occupied.

That logic is furthermore reflected in the corporate market of Mexico City.

Over the past year, the aviation segment has remained in balance, with new occupations offsetting exits and relocations, thereby maintaining a stable total occupied area. An example is Delta Air Lines' absorption of more than 200 sqm in Polanco, which, together with Air France's expansion, offsets adjustments such as Aeroméxico's reduction of roughly 600 sqm in Reforma, linked to an operational reconfiguration aimed at efficiency.

That balance is not the result of inertia, but of concentration. According to SiiLA, in Mexico City’s aviation sector, 7 out of 10 companies are airlines, and 1 out of 3 is Mexican. These domestic carriers account for roughly 45% of the sector’s gross leasable area in the metropolitan region, with more than 8,000 sqm in operation—excluding airport corporate offices.

Hence, corporate space ceases to be merely administrative support and becomes part of the strategy itself. Every adjustment in square meters is, in reality, an adjustment in the network.

Interested in how these dynamics appear in other corporate corridors? Visit SiiLA Market Analytics or write to contacto@siila.com.mx.

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¹ Source: INEGI, Monthly Services Survey (EMS), total revenues by sector SCIAN 4811 and 4812, original series, 2018–2023. The 2024–2025 projections were estimated using ETS and ARIMA models, following Hyndman & Khandakar (2008), which were selected based on the AIC criterion and combined through simple averaging to reduce specification bias. Calculations conducted in R 4.3.1 (forecast and tidyverse). Variations expressed as annual rates (YoY). Version reference provided solely to ensure reproducibility.