EMIRATES is at work, getting its passenger operations from South Africa back on track, planning the reintroduction of a daily Airbus A380 service on its Johannesburg route. While clearly optimistic, the airline is taking a cautious and balanced approach to rebuilding capacity and monitoring demand.
Sharing details of the re-entry strategy, Emirates Regional Manager Southern Africa, Afzal Parambil, told Travel News that the main focus at the moment was to maintain and grow load factors. “And we’re watching that very closely. We are already seeing a healthy surge in demand across our three gateways – Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg – and hope that, in the longer term and based on our performance, we can expand our presence to pre-pandemic levels.”
The carrier has expanded its weekly schedule to South Africa to 28 flights during October. Double-daily flights to Johannesburg are scheduled from December 1, and daily flights from Cape Town and Durban. It will be the airline’s largest weekly schedule to South Africa since the start of the pandemic. From January, it plans to add a second A380 on its Johannesburg route.
Parambil said the airline was working actively with its trade partners in South Africa to rebuild leisure and corporate business. Dubai remained a popular holiday gateway, he explained, and Emirates had also resuscitated its commercial relationship with SAA to collect more traffic from connecting markets on the new SAA’s revised route network.
Commission for agency partners had been reintroduced at the start of this year, said Parambil, with Emirates one of the few airlines that paid commission. (The carrier announced in September 2020 that it would effectively remove agent commissions in the market, replacing the 5% commission with 0,01% on March 31. When March 2021 came around, EK relented, saying it would retain agent commissions until an unspecified date. Click here.)
“We have empowered our trade partners, delivering even better customer experiences on Emirates Gateway, including access to the widest range of Emirates fare products, differentiated pricing such as dedicated promotional fares and pre-sales, enhanced customer servicing and experiences, and differentiated pricing for selected ancillary services, and faster access to new ancillary products,” said Parambil.
Concerning Emirates’ co-operation agreements with other airlines in South Africa, Parambil said the existing partnerships with Airlink, CemAir and FlySafair, as well as SAA, gave its travellers access to 79 cities beyond its gateways in South Africa, across the continent.
Emirates and SAA are working toward aligning loyalty programmes and, effective since last month, travellers have had access to seamless luggage check-in to their final destination when travelling on SAA-coded and Emirates-operated routes.
Parambil said Dubai was still a big draw for South African holidaymakers and that Expo 2020 Dubai was the highlight for destination Dubai for the remainder of 2021 until April 2022.
Looking ahead, he said EK had already recovered 90% of its pre-pandemic network and planned to restore 70% of capacity by the close of 2021.
“COVID-19 has created a state of play in the industry that is unprecedented in scale, and Emirates has had to navigate the complexities of extensive travel and border restrictions along with a number of other challenges. Today we have reinstated flights to over 120 cities globally, with safe and convenient connections via our Dubai hub,” he said.
“We are optimistic about demand improving even further as we move through 2021 into 2022, and we are on standby to ramp up our operations across the network even further and support South Africa’s tourism recovery as travellers once again head out to discover the world. We’re also seeing strong bookings to and from Dubai for the back half of this year and for next year.”
Emirates says it plans to reopen its airport lounge in Johannesburg soon.
