On Monday, a round-trip ticket in coach for July 3-10 cost $1,386.80, plus about $83 in taxes. Expensive? Oui, but even so, Delta spokesman Anthony Black said that this week, the flights are 70 percent booked. They are 80 percent booked next week.

Most of the passengers in the flights to and from Salt Lake were local dignitaries. But a few French passengers made the trip, surprised that there's a direct route to Salt Lake City from Paris and surprised they were on the inaugural flights.

Marie-France Delattre, a professional photographer from Nantes, France, plans to spend 24 days in Utah and Wyoming shooting the mountain landscapes.

"It was quite fast," Delattre said of the flight, adding that the last time she came to Utah, she flew to Los Angeles, rented a car and drove to southern Utah.

Passengers Freifrau and Peter von Steinacker said a layover in Salt Lake didn't make much of a difference in their travel plans. The couple were traveling home to Nice, France, from Palm Springs, Calif. They would have had the same number of transfers if they had flown directly to Paris from Los Angeles as they would flying to Salt Lake City.

Randy Hales, chief executive officer of Orem-based Mity-Lite, a furniture manufacturer, needed to be on the Monday flight in order to attend a ribbon cutting at a new Mity-Lite facility in Germany. From Paris, he plans to take a high-speed train to Germany.

"This is perfect," he said. "From Paris it's about a two-hour train ride to where we're going," he said.

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E-mail: lhancock@desnews.com