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Despite a surge in demand for domestic flights during the Soccer World Cup, South African Airways (SAA) has not raised its average airfare, spokesman Fani Zulu said yesterday. Demand in the first few days of the tournament has been such that SAA has added 306 additional flights between last Saturday and July 12.
These include 124 flights to Johannesburg and Cape Town, 64 flights between Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth, 78 flights between Johannesburg and Durban and 40 coastal flights between Cape Town and Durban. “We would not have been able to add that much extra capacity if our prices had been unreasonably increased. Passengers would have sought alternatives ,” said Zulu.
SAA was criticised ahead of the tournament for allegedly hiking its air fares and taking advantage of the high demand. Last month, Democratic Alliance (DA) tourism spokesman Greg Krumbock claimed SAA’s economy fares were more than 70% higher during the tournament and 60% higher than its competitors. Mr Zulu said the DA’s research was flawed as it was based only on prices quoted on the internet and did not include fares already sold or offered through other channels.
“Every flight has different price categories and of course the cheaper fares are sold first,” said Mr Zulu. “SAA is priced very competitively except for a few peak days where demand is high and there are few seats available. “On these days, all the cheaper seats have been sold out with few expensive seats still available. For the rest of the period, SAA is very competitive with all other carriers (even low cost carriers).”
SAA said that in the first few days of the World Cup, the airline had operated its domestic flights virtually at capacity while forward bookings for the rest of the tournament showed that load factors were already on average above 80%. “On the day after the World Cup opening match at Soccer City we had eight additional flights to Cape Town and Johannesburg,” said Mr Zulu.
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