By the festive season it will have restarted flights to one airport each in Namibia and Zimbabwe, and to two cities in Malawi, South African Airways (SAA) said on Thursday.
It promised details – such as the frequency of flights – only in the coming weeks, and it is not year clear how it will price tickets on those routes.
SAA will be flying to Blantyre and Lilongwe in Malawi, to Zimbabwe’s Victoria Falls, and to Windhoek in Namibia.
It also promised more frequent flights to Accra, Harare, Lusaka, Kinshasa, and Mauritius – and said it would be increasing the frequency of flights to and from Cape Town and Durban.
SAA will not be flying beyond Africa yet, but said that plans are “underway” to “launch SAA’s first post re-start intercontinental route during the first quarter of the new year.”
The airline had previously asked to keep the rights to fly to the USA, Germany, the UK, Brazil, and Australia.
The announcement of the flights to neighbouring countries comes after SAA met with the International Air Services Council (IASC), where it appears to have reached a settlement. In September, that body cancelled SAA rights to some routes because they were not operational, once a standard procedure in the airline world.
SAA now says it “retains all its historical route traffic rights, following SAA’s voluntary relinquishing of the number of frequencies on the destinations it is not currently servicing.”
It did not say which routes it plans to give up for good.
In pre-pandemic times, many international routes were hot properties, with airports and regulators under pressure to re-assign unused slots quickly when airlines ran into trouble.
However, with the recovery in travel still patchy – and some uncertainty about how fast airlines should move to rebuild seat capacity – competition for some routes remains non-existent.
