Flights between Cape Town and Heathrow increased by BA

Following on the heels of Air France, which announced a daily flight between Paris and Cape Town three times a week from November, British Airways yesterday said it would be launching double-daily services to Heathrow from the end of October, for the summer.This means, said Gavin Halliday, the airline’s general

manager for Europe and Africa, that the British airline now privatised would be carrying about 700 more passengers a week between the two cities, bringing the total number to about 4700 seats a week.With the first flight at 8.20am arriving at Heathrow at about 6.20pm and with the second leaving Cape Town at 8pm, the airline will boost its Heathrow to Cape Town route from the 13 flights a week to 14.Holiday said BA was alsoputting larger aircraft on the Cape Town route, resulting in a 17.5% increase in the number of seats.Halliday said yesterday that South Africa’s success in hosting the World Cup had considerably enhanced the country’s reputation as a premier tourist destination and that foreign visits were expected to increase.

Asked whether the sensational murder last year of Swedish tourist Anni Dewani in a case that led to her British husband Shrien Dewani being accused of setting up the murder would have any bearing on tourist numbers, Halliday flatly said it wouldn’t.Such isolated cases of crime happened in all the major metropolitan centres served by the airline.He said the airline catered to the whims of the tourist market and had to pay attention to these vectors.The case had no bearing on the attractiveness of Cape Town as a tourist destination, said Halliday.In terms of security, South Africa doesn’t have a profile any different to any other country.The move by BA to double its direct daily flights between Cape Town and Heathrow comes shortly after Air France announced last month that it would be starting three direct flights a week between Cape Town and Paris.This comes as airlines are refining their businesses on a number of levels to boost their balance sheets amid ever tighter profit margins.Halliday said that according to the International AirTransport Association, the average profit margin for the industry over the past 40 years had been just 0.1%.

Nonetheless, with the flood of tourists between Europe and South Africa, and with its Iberia merger, BA will now take advantage of the Madrid hub.Tourist numbers are expected to increase and Halliday said that UK travel agents were working on selling the underrated South African winter months to their markets.He pointed to the tourism potential for South Africa as he warned about expensive airport charges locally.Citing the director-general of the International Air Travel Association, Giovanni Bisignani, the BA manager said that the South African regulator was almost certainly going to allow the Airports Company of South Africa to raise its charges by 129% by 2015.Such a move would add $1.2bn (R8.4bn) to airline costs, said Halliday, warning that the effect on the tourism industry and the airline industry’s concerns over so-called protectionist measures for national flagship carriers could kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Citing a figure that he said was produced by the South African tourism authorities, for every 16 tourists to South Africa, one job was created.That said, he added he was unsure of the extent to which the visa regime recently imposed on South Africans travelling to the UK by the British government, had effected tourism from South Africa to the UK.This was, however, an issue that the airline would be raising with British authorities, said Halliday, indicating that it was in the airline’s interests for South Africans to be able to travel to the UK visa-free.