The advice on Air France-KLM shares has been downgraded from ‘hold’ to ‘sell’ by analysts at Royal Bank of Scotland, news agency AFN reports.

The bank expects the airline to see a greater drop in expensive tickets on long-haul flights than its competitors and is unimpressed by the cost-cutting programme introduced at the beginning of 2011, says AFN.
Air France-KLM is hampered by its heavy presence in Africa and Japan, where the Japanese earthquake and tsunami and the unrest in the Arab world have taken their toll on company profits, says the bank.