Dubai flag-carrier airline Emirates viewed South Africa as a strategically important growth destination and planned to hike its capacity, Afzal Parambil, Emirates’s Southern Africa regional manager said in an interview yesterday.
From an outbound perspective, Parambil said Emirates’s performance so far this year in the market had exceeded its expectations and was in line with the current capacity it was operating in and out of its South African gateways.
He said last year had seen a phenomenal rebound in travel – a trend that was expected to continue this year.
“From March 1, 2023, we have expanded our schedule to and from Johannesburg with three daily flights operated with an Airbus A380 and Boeing B777 aircraft. Cape Town went double daily, starting on February 1, 2023. Durban continues to be served with a daily service. With the reintroduction of these new flights, we will enhance our schedule to 42-weekly services.
“The ramp-up of flights are part of our ongoing commitment to support South Africa’s economic and tourism recovery through enhanced connectivity across all of our gateways,” Parambil said.
Last year, Emirates also signed a memorandum of understanding with the South Africa Tourism Board to jointly promote tourism, and boost visitor arrivals and inbound traffic to South Africa from key markets across the Emirates’ network.
Parambil said an increase in air travel demand continued to outstrip capacity across the industry, and as an airline they were working hard to provide more seat capacity where possible across their network to respond to the demand.
He said their airline partnerships with SAA, Airlink, CemAir, FlySafair were all performing well and were as a result seeing high feeder demand in their regional/domestic market. Johannesburg continued to be the regional hub and strongest performer when it came to codeshares.
“South Africans are travelling to the UK, Germany, Turkey, India, Thailand, the US, Saudi Arabia and Dubai… These are our top destinations. Dubai is our number one destination this year and with all our recent activities (such as Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing roadshows) we are seeing an increasing demand for Dubai,” Parambil said.
Emirates said it played an important role in connecting South Africa to the rest of the world via Dubai, as it currently flew to 21 airports in 19 countries in Africa-with around 350 flights every week and in both directions.
He said consumer segments had returned to pre-pandemic patterns.
“Corporate is slower in getting back, however, with the need to conduct business in person, as well as international conferences getting back into gear, we believe we’ll be seeing that segment rebuild very soon. Premium demand (both in first and business class) is higher than the industry average on Emirates across our three ZA gateways,” Parambil said.
Emirates is also a supply gap. South African Airways (SAA), which previously served over 34 international destinations from its hub at OR Tambo International Airport, lost several routes after it went into voluntary business rescue.
The South African flag carrier resumed operations in September, 2021 with a reduced fleet of six aircraft. The airline could not serve several of its previous destinations and as a result the International Air Services Commission cancelled some of its flight frequencies.
Kev Storie, chief operating officer at the Commercial Aviation Association of Southern Africa (Caasa) said, “This is good news. Any increase in scheduled flights and raising tourism numbers are welcome and needed. It would have been better that our airlines expanded their routes as then we would retain some of the profits made via company taxes to help our economy…”
He said with strong flight numbers, this would cascade into our other sectors, as passengers spent their foreign currency.
BUSINESS REPORT