Cape Town - When this column was written, we were still waiting for the first 12 overseas destinations to which Middle Eastern airline Etihad will carry SAA passengers under extensive new codeshare arrangements to be identified.
Spokespeople explained that they were still waiting for official confirmation from the countries to be visited.
Hopefully they will include some in the UK and Western Europe, since not everyone visiting the UK wants to go straight to London and SAA, during the difficult years it has gone through, withdrew from most of its former European destinations.
The new codeshare arrangements are expected to save SAA millions of rand by reducing the number of new-generation aircraft it will have to acquire and through other joint activities.
SAA has already named 10 of the destinations to which it will carry Etihad passengers from Joburg, to which the United Arab Emirates (UAE) airline flies daily, as Cape Town (which is likely to boost business travel and foreign tourism to this city), Durban, East London, Port Elizabeth, Livingstone, Lusaka, Ndola, Harare, Victoria Falls and Sao Paulo, the industrial capital of Brazil.
The new codeshare is, of course, with Etihad, which is based in Abu Dhabi and not with the entire UAE, as it was mistakenly described during the editing process in captions to the pictures accompanying last week’s column. SAA already has a long-standing codeshare arrangement with the UAE’s older and larger airline, Emirates, which applies only to flights between Cape Town, Durban or Joburg and Dubai.
Etihad withdrew from Cape Town last year to increase the number of its flights to Joburg and because of this, and Capetonians’ reluctance to change planes in Joburg, it is possible that passengers from this city will prefer to fly with Emirates at least as far as Dubai before travelling by road the comparatively short distance to Abu Dhabi if they switch to Etihad.
Etihad chief executive James Hogan said in a recent speech in Amsterdam that the global air travel map was being rewritten as growth rates slowed in traditional markets and surged in emerging markets including India, Africa and Latin America.
He said the Arabian Gulf, which is the geographic centre of the world, is now evolving as the global centre of the airline industry, with the number of passengers passing through the airline hubs in the Gulf outstripping global growth rates for the industry. - Weekend Argus