Cape Town - Emirates, which flies non-stop between Cape Town and Dubai all year round, will use a larger aircraft – a Boeing 777 Extended Range, with 90 more seats – from September 1 in readiness for increased demand during the holiday season.
The airline provides connecting flights from Dubai to most parts of the world and many Cape Town business people prefer it to changing planes in Johannesburg.
It’s also popular with tourists going to the UK because of the very high arrival and departure tax charged by the British government. This works out at more than R1 000 for each member of a family flying non-stop from this country, including children.
It is based on the distance flown by the aircraft in which you arrive and so discriminates against passengers arriving on long-haul flights. The distance from Dubai is much shorter and it offers the added advantage that Emirates flies to several destinations in Britain, not only to London.
As with its giant Airbus A380s, the B777 ER Emirates will use on the Cape Town route offers private cabins for its first-class passengers. The first and business class seats convert into flat beds. The entertainment system in all three classes offers up to 1 500 channels to suit passengers from all over the world, includes audio books and music as well as the usual films, TV programmes and games.
The baggage allowance is bigger than on most competing airlines – 30kg in economy, 40kg in business class and 50kg in first class. When Emirates first launched its flights to South Africa, Dubai was known as a shopping destination, and it still is in many parts of the world. But for South Africans, this only holds true for electrical goods or possibly during the annual sale, when prices all over the city are cut.
If you fancy a stopover of a day or two in the city there is plenty to do and see, ranging from a trip into the desert or wandering in the bazaars, to trips to museums and an extraordinary range of architecture. There are some good hotels, with friendly, welcoming and efficient staff.
Fastjet – the low-cost airline listed on the London Stock Exchange, and in which I’m assured Lonrho still has a 50 percent stake – is about to launch its service between Dar es Salaam and Johannesburg and tickets are already on sale on its website, www.fastjet.com. This is the only way South Africans can buy them at the moment.
I have been wary of writing about it following the sudden cancellation of Fastjet’s earlier plan to fly between Cape Town and Johannesburg, which has been postponed indefinitely in favour of the service from Dar es Salaam. Conflicting reports also made me uncertain of its ownership and financial situation.
But it has now been reported that Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder and chief executive of the successful British low-cost airline Easyjet, has increased his stake in Fastjet from less than 3 percent to 5.81 percent in lieu of all royalty and consultancy payments up to December.
Fastjet is the holding company for African airline Fly 540, started by Lonrho, which operates in Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana and Angola. Flights under the Fastjet brand started in Tanzania last November and the service to Johannesburg is a step towards its aim of becoming a pan-African low-cost airline linking most countries on the continent. It has introduced recently acquired Airbus A 319s into its fleet and, according to a press release from London, it and its Fly 540 subsidiaries carried almost 800 000 passengers in the year to March, 50 percent more than the previous year. Also, 99.2 percent of its flights left on time, with no cancellations.
It will compete with SAA, at present the only airline offering direct non-stop flights between Johannesburg and Dar es Salaam, following the withdrawal of Comair from the route on the grounds that it was not profitable.
SAA has been charging a return fare of about R6 000 but an inquiry this week revealed that the fare changed daily, with a long wait for the consultant to ask her supervisor what it would be next week. This suggests that the national carrier may be preparing to reduce it for a time at least.
According to Fastjet’s new public relations company, Tribeca, Fastjet is charging the US dollar equivalent of R3 500 for a return flight with checked-in luggage. Indirect flights by way of Nairobi are offered by Kenya Airways but the cheapest alternative to SAA has so far been Ethiopian Airways by way of Addis Ababa for the dollar equivalent of about R5 150. - Weekend Argus