African airlines demand action on costly travel

Southern Africa’s airline industry is losing patience with governments that commission expensive aviation strategies and leave them on the shelf. Meanwhile, travellers wait for affordable flights between African countries.

The passenger wish list is hardly complicated: an affordable flight, at a useful time, paid for seamlessly on a phone. The Airlines Association of Southern Africa (AASA) has now placed this expectation at the heart of its strategic expectations.

“We need to design aviation around reasonably priced flights that depart and arrive on time, with convenient business-oriented schedules, that can be purchased using frictionless digital payments compatible with mobile money, offering products suited to traders as well as tourists, using efficient airports and border processes,” said Aaron Munetsi, CEO of AASA, in his address to the association’s 56th Annual General Assembly in Mauritius last week.

AASA represents airlines across Southern Africa, giving it a direct interest in getting more people into aircraft. Munetsi’s argument also has implications for anyone trying to sell a holiday or do business across a border.

An airline can sell tickets online and still make payment difficult for the customers it hopes to attract. Accepting mobile money and other widespread payment technologies would allow travellers to buy flights using the payment services they already use for everyday purchases.

Munetsi’s impatience was directed at the long gap between drawing up plans and putting them into practice.

“The industry and governments have spent decades discussing the challenges facing African aviation and commissioning consultants to provide expensive strategies only to leave them unimplemented,” he said. “Strategies don’t move people. Now it is time to make the difficult decisions and execute them.”

AASA has set out five priorities for action, with safety at the forefront:

• Make safety non-negotiable: Invest in resources, effective oversight and training, with zero tolerance for shortcuts.
• Contain costs: Rein in aviation-related taxes, fees and charges, and avoid introducing new ones.
• Improve infrastructure: Modernise and maintain airports and other aviation infrastructure, with affordable charges for their use.
• Open aviation markets: Remove anti-competitive and protectionist restrictions, and implement the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) to make it easier for African airlines to operate across borders.
• Harmonise regulations: Standardise rules, recognise licences and align procedures across borders.

For travellers, the most useful outcome would be a wider choice of flights between African destinations. For a hotel or tour operator, another viable route can make its offering accessible to a new group of customers. AASA wants the commitments to liberalise air transport converted into the permissions airlines need to operate.

However, these responsibilities extend across government departments and airport operators, as well as airlines. A carrier can improve its booking system, while governments control market access and many of the charges attached to flying.

Tourism businesses will be paying close attention. Every additional visitor needs services at the destination, and easier air travel can also help a business reach buyers in another country.

Munetsi’s connected those opportunities to the aviation reforms he wants implemented: “Efficient air connectivity increases trade, passenger traffic and tourism while helping Africa trade more effectively with itself. Aviation does not just deliver passengers. We deliver the catalytic effect to economies.”

* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, editor of GadgetWings, and author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge”.