I hadn’t eaten in the Westcliff Hotel for a few years, having been disgusted by the awful buffet that was served after a company results briefing. However, chefs change, and I was interested to see how they are doing these days.
To my surprise and annoyance, they didn’t want the Business Day photographer to linger and just allowed him to take a few pictures of my lunchtime chum.
Possibly they were worried that crinkly old patrons with their young and beautiful companions might be worried about being photographed (and that’s just the women).
I had arrived early in the popular and bustling terrace restaurant, having first taken a golf cart and then a lift up the cliff.
I do hope the story is true that some foreign visitors on the terrace once spotted elephants down the hill in the nearby Joburg zoo and assumed this was typical of suburban SA.
If the view from the terrace over the man-made forest of Joburg was magnificent, despite a rather cloudy and chilly day, so were the prices, as I discovered when I studied the menu.
A Wagyu sirloin was going for a ridiculous R1,095 — plus R48 for chips. Caviar (which I accept is never cheap) was from R1,350 for 15g to R3,950 for 15g of Beluga. The cheapest pasta was R265.
Enough homework, as Glenn Orsmond had arrived, looking rather normal for an airline boss who had just been coping with a reputational crisis at both his Comair airlines — kulula.com and the local British Airways franchise. These were grounded for five days by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).
Orsmond, an accountant by training, entered the airline business almost by accident, but has run a few well-known local carriers. This is his third time at Comair, and he also headed 1Time and Sun Air.
His latest stint at Comair started in 2020, just as Covid-19 arrived.
“Comair was in business rescue in May, and I was out of the company at the time,” he explained.
“We were one of two teams of rescue bidders, and our rescue plan was approved, although we had to overcome lots of hurdles to get flying again.” These included winning the support of the trade unions and the competition authorities.
They took to the skies again at the end of 2020 “and then a second Covid wave came in January — there was a massive over-reaction by the government, and we were hit with this setback.
“We flew through the second wave and were back on our feet in March-April, but were then hit by the third wave in July last year and had to suspend all operations. We restarted on September the first, then Omicron arrived, but the government’s response was less severe.
“We were fully booked for December, but then SA was put on global blacklists, so tickets for foreigners travelling within SA — a massive part of our BA market — got cancelled. We survived that, and are now looking strong, although the Ukrainian war has put up the oil price.”
You have to sympathise with anyone who had to run a business through all this, but the worst was yet to come. A few weeks ago, Comair was hit by a suspension, and there were also suspensions for two aircraft maintenance contractors.
Back to the food. A bread basket arrived with bread rolls and Melba toast. Nice crusty rolls, but a little lacking in salt. They came with two spreads — an aubergine slime, which was tasteless and uninspiring, and basil butter, which tasted of basil but not much else. The Melba toast was great though.
No starters, but Orsmond opted for grilled kabeljou, which looked delicious, and he said was. I went for the Greek-style lamb chops, and we started with a R450 bottle of Jordan chenin blanc, which was a little sharp, but enjoyable.
My lamb was quite fatty and a bit over-cooked (I had asked for medium-rare). It was beautifully seasoned, but one chop was stacked atop another, and so by the time I had demolished the pile, the last two chops had cooled down too much. Style over substance and noshability.
Some tiny, timid potatoes were hidden under the lamb (they were supposed to be hasselback, but maybe making them tasty was too much hassle back in the kitchen) and some veg.
Back to the Comair grounding and suggestions that communications had been poor: “On the day it happened we received a communication at 6am saying our licence had been suspended as a precautionary thing, but we had been due to carry 10,000 passengers that day,” Orsmond recalled.
“It’s not easy. When it broke, I went to the airport, faced passengers, and did several live interviews. Subsequently, we had to identify and tackle the core issues from the media point of view.
“People needed certainty around when we would be flying, and we did not have that certainty. Then there was the refunds issue, and people were also asking why they couldn’t get through to the call centre.
“We focused on these three core issues, and they weren’t easy fixes, but the suspension was lifted. And we are back flying. We are through that now; we are out of the crisis.
We literally worked through the night for five nights in a row — and I must say the CAA worked through the night with us — all five nights until the two parties could satisfy each other
“We have to respect the integrity and office of the CAA, and we are not buying into any conspiracy theories. They are doing their job, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we agree with each and every finding. The lesson is that, regardless of your views on the finding, you have to respond to it.”
Orsmond was adamant that no corners have ever been cut on safety, though Comair had cut costs in other areas to remain sustainable.
“As regards safety, we are obsessive, an airline has to be,” he says. “There is no way you can cut costs on safety maintenance — it is prescribed by law, there are no grey areas and it is absolute. There are no opportunities, and we don’t look for any.”
So, what was it like with a barrage of bad publicity and the need to resolve the regulatory problems and get the Kulula and BA planes flying again?
“We literally worked through the night for five nights in a row — and I must say the CAA worked through the night with us — all five nights until the two parties could satisfy each other,” Orsmond recalls.
“There was not a single [negative] finding on our maintenance of aircraft, nor on our flight operations.”
He is confident the business will survive all these knocks, though the total SA market has shrunk from 15-million domestic passenger departures a year pre-Covid to about 10-million. “But hopefully the market will grow to about 11.5-million this year,” Orsmond suggests.
The main hit has been on SA business travel, which has slumped to about 20%-30% of what it was. All those online chats have hit business travel hard.
“We are optimistic, we are in a growing market again,” Orsmond says. “We have structured our business for the current market, and we are also going aggressively into the regional market.”
He gives examples of adding routes to Zanzibar, Lusaka, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and Malawi, and there are also plans to boost frequencies on existing routes, such as Mauritius, Harare and Victoria Falls.
As we continued to chat, I explained my own terror of Covid and said I had not flown since the pandemic first arrived.
“There is not a single recorded case of anyone getting Covid on a plane, anywhere. The air filter is effective. You are more likely to get Covid in the airport car park than in an aircraft,” he assured me.
One big uncertainty affecting the SA aviation market is what will happen with the cash-gobbling SAA, into which investors need to put R3.5bn.
“It is an insolvent business,” says Orsmond. “Public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan and his department are trying to secure additional funding for SAA, as the proposed investors won’t put it in. However, we welcome SAA as a competitor.
Globally, short-haul domestic travel is recovering rapidly from pre-Covid levels ... This is good news for our travel industry
There has been talk that Comair has its own financial crisis, to which he responds: “We are currently engaging with all our funders and investors to ensure that we can take advantage of the recovery of travel markets. Globally, short-haul domestic travel is recovering rapidly from pre-Covid levels and we see this happening now in SA. This is good news for our travel industry.
“There are 50 flights a day from Joburg to Cape Town. If you book in advance, you can get a flight for R1,000 one-way. Nowhere in the world is cheaper than SA, —we have the lowest airfares in the world.”
I am a bit of a nut about cheese, and I cheekily suggested we share a local cheese board. What a rip-off it turned out to be.
Only two of the four microscopic morsels of cheese — not enough for a mousetrap — had any real flavour. There was lots and lots and lots of toast and biscuits — most biscuits were fine, but the digestive I tried was soggy. Maybe it had tried to escape and gone for a swim?
Orsmond had another glass of white, while I opted for a (surprisingly generous) glass of Vergelegen red blend. It was the only truly classy thing about our lunch (apart from the two of us).
I accept that when you dine in a plush hotel, you will often be charged plush hotel prices, but I also expect five-star food in return.
I know we (Orsmond, fortunately) were also paying for the view from the Westcliffe’s terrace, but we had not gone over the top in what we ate, and the food had failed to live up to its price tag. I won’t be back.
Fortunately, though, the company made up for it.
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