As Emirates gears up to increase flights to and from SA, Emirates Southern Africa regional manager Afzal Parambil has outlined its strategy for the country and region.
The airline expects its business in SA to have recovered to pre-Covid levels by March 2025, when it will go back to having 49 flights a week to the country.
The company is bullish about the growth of travel in the region and is using SA as a hub for its Southern Africa expansion.
To give an idea of its local investment, a study by Genesis Analytics in 2016 found that the Emirates Group’s operations contributed $417m in GDP to SA’s economy in 2014/15.
At the time, Emirates’ direct expenditure in the country was over $120m, accounting for fuel, ground handling and flight landing costs, overflying costs, crew accommodation and catering.
Business Day spoke with Parambil.
What is the strategic importance of SA to Emirates?
For Emirates, SA represents access to Southern Africa. Johannesburg’s OR Tambo airport is by far the largest on the African continent, and airports in Durban and Cape Town usually feature in the top 10 to 15 in Africa.
SA has a population of 60-million, but we are looking at 160-million people in the Southern Africa region. SA opens up the opportunity to reach out to this bigger population.
Has demand on the SA route recovered from Covid-19?
We have 42 weekly flights now, which consists of three daily flights to Johannesburg, two flights to Cape Town and one to Durban.
Pre-Covid-19 we had 49 weekly flights, so we are almost 90% of pre-Covid levels in terms of flight capacity. From March 1 [2025], we will be introducing our fourth frequency to Joburg to make the 49 weekly flights, restoring the entire flight operation that we had pre-Covid.
What travel patterns are you seeing to and from SA?
The biggest challenge any airline faces is seasonal imbalance. A couple of months in a year will be peak season, and the rest will be slower or low season.
But SA now offers us a year-round balanced performance. We no longer see a peak in December or around the June-July school holidays. We are observing year-round demand in and out of SA.
This is partly because of the new source market. June, July and August are the coldest months in SA and we usually see a very low occupancy in hotels. But it complements the Middle Eastern market, for which June, July and August are the hottest months. Tourists look for a destination which is cooler, with the majority of them looking for a southern hemisphere destination.
Over the last two years, we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of passengers and families travelling to SA. Cape Town has received many new customers, specifically from non-traditional source markets, not from Europe or America, but from the Middle East.
How would you describe the competitive landscape in the region?
We strongly believe competition is good for the industry. It’s good for customers and consumers and healthy competition always develops more business opportunities.
Emirates focuses on partnerships. Our oldest partner in SA is SAA, since 1997. We support each other in generating passenger flows to and from SA. Recently, we enhanced our relationship with Airlink, signing a code-share partnership which enables us to get to almost 60 destinations. We also work very closely with FlySafair. In addition, we have 18 airline partners in Africa. Together with our partners, we offer more than 200 destinations in Africa.
What is the shape of demand for Emirates’ various options — economy, business class and first class — in the region?
Across the industry, we are seeing a good performance across all three cabin classes.
Emirates is doing better than in previous years and in premium class cabins — that’s first and business class — we are outperforming the industry. We are one of the few airlines offering a first-class cabin into SA. Premium-class cabins are in demand compared with the pre-Covid period.
Economies around the world are facing a cost of living crisis, with high inflation and interest rates. How has this affected demand for Emirates?
I believe Covid-19 gave us a different platform because we started to see new trends and patterns post the pandemic.
We’ve seen a surge in travel, and some of the traditional patterns were broken because people started travelling to new destinations. Network-wide, we are seeing a surge in business and demand remains very high. There may be challenges in terms of inflation and the cost of living is increasing, but travel is also essential.
Some leisure holiday passengers who can afford a holiday take regional destinations, others go international, while others take beach holidays. It depends on their capability, [but] travel seems not to be affected from what we see.
Travel enables SMEs and the business community to develop their business and income. Travel is not a cost alone, it is an investment to develop their businesses. So we don’t foresee any challenges at this point in time.
* This article has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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