South Africa’s national carrier, SAA has celebrated one year since resuming commercial operations after going through a lengthy business rescue process and difficult turn-around. While the airline is a much smaller version of its smaller self, the new SAA is counting on a smarter and more responsible approach to its growth in a new era as it also brings on-board a new strategic equity partner, the Takatso consortium.
The Chairman of the Interim Board and CEO, Professor John Lamola reflected that: “It has been a challenging but stimulating 12 months. We have been inspired by the fact that SAA has successfully been flying the national flag for 88 years surviving formidable historical turbulences, both economic and political. Thus we are firmly focused on rebuilding this airline and making South Africans proud”.
Lamola took the opportunity to outline SAA’s activities over the past 12 months:
- SAA has maintained its impeccable and enviable air safety record, whilst restoring the kind of world class customer service that SAA has become renown for.
- We successfully operated eight routes in Africa, six regionally and two domestically; despite the December-January disruption by the Omnicrom variant of Covid-19, flying over 500 000 customers safely to their destinations,
- The original fleet of aircraft that we started operations with is being upgrade into the second phase of our strategy, whereby during this month, the programme of replacing the A319s with A320s and adding one more A330 to the fleet has commenced.
- SAA has operated 13 Charters with its A340, and has taken 23 sports teams to their destinations across Africa,
- Air travellers have regained confidence and trust in SAA. We have safely escorted and transported 314 unaccompanied minors this year,
- There are 3412 new Voyager members and collectively our loyalty programme members have earned 2.7 million miles,
- The popularity of our airport lounges has showing phenomenal growth following the conclusion of a partnership with Discovery Bank to renovate the lounges and avail access to Discovery Vitality members and the bank’s premium clients.
- SAA has codeshare agreements with Emirates, Air Mauritius, LAM Mozambique, Egyptair, Ethiopian, Singapore Airlines and Kenya Airways; our prized customer offering in this context is SAA’s membership of the 24 member airlines network, Star Alliance, which prides itself as being the world’s largest global airline alliance,
- SAA has also entered into a unique and ambitious partnership framework agreement with Kenya Airways entailing an active codeshare, cooperation on aircraft maintenance services, cargo uplift and lounge access,
Alongside all this operational successes, has been the support of regulatory and legal processes that the shareholder is engaged in, in closing the transaction on the onboarding of the Takatso Consortium as the strategic equity partner for SAA. We are glad that this process is now set for conclusion before the end of SAA’s current financial year, that is, the end of March 2023.
“As we celebrate all these successes our very sincere and humble gratitude goes to all our customers, staff, suppliers and a variety of stakeholders”, adds Lamola.
