Durban has positioned itself as an important hub for South Africa, attracting a number of international airlines to King Shaka International Airport (KSIA), while industry players say more airlines will soon land on KwaZulu Natal’s coast.

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“I can’t tell you who is coming, but we have a strategy,” TKZN CEO Ndaba Khoza told Tourism Update. “We know that it is important for us to be connected to Europe, we know that it’s still important for us to be connected to India, we know it’s important to be connected to Asia. It’s important to be connected to most countries across Africa,” he says.

Terence Delomoney, GM KSIA, says now that the region has secured a number of international airlines, there is a lot of interest from other airlines. “One would expect in the short to medium term that there could be other airlines that are interested.” 

The airport also has the capacity to accommodate more international flights, according to Delomoney. He says KSIA was initially built to handle 7.5 million passengers but that this number can be expanded if the need arises. He says Acsa is relooking at the KSIA master plan to include expansion plans on the long term.

For now, the province is concentrating on the three international airlines that have recently announced routes to KZN. At the beginning of the month, Turkish Airlines launched direct flights from KSIA, while Qatar Airways and Ethiopian Airlines have announced they will start direct services from mid-December. These new carriers will join Emirates, Air Mauritius, Proflight and SA Express in offering international flights to and from Durban.

The new routes will be an important boost for tourism for KZN, according to Khoza. He says when airlines launch a new route they also deploy marketing resources to ensure the route will be sustainable. This in turn leads to tour operators reconfiguring itineraries to include the destination and to extend the length of stay at a particular destination. With the introduction of direct links, DMCs also start to take the destination more seriously.

The new airlines KZN has attracted are network airlines and will firmly position Durban and KZN on the global map, says Khoza. He says the province is not only looking at the direct connections to Istanbul, Doha and Addis Ababa but is looking further to the network these airlines offer. “We will utilise the strength of their networks to co-operate with them and market in our key source markets.”

According to Khoza, airlines that want to expand their reach have increasingly started to explore secondary cities, such as Durban. After flying hub to hub, these airlines are now looking at flying to secondary feeder cities. “If you look at aviation numbers and statistics in South Africa, there are between 17 million and 18 million passengers flying out of OR Tambo International Airport, eight million out of Cape Town, five million out of Durban and one million out of PE. If, as an airline, you still want to expand in South Africa, the only logical thing to do is come to KSIA.”

Khoza says Tourism KZN is also providing support to airlines in the form of incentives. For example, it is offering to host educationals for travel agents and media from important source markets, and the province has also offered to work together with the airlines on joint marketing agreements. Says Khoza: “It takes quite a while for an airline to establish a new route. Some of the marketing commitments we’ve made serve to cushion them during that time. But we’ve benchmarked that against what other secondary airports around the world are doing.”