In response to Lift’s announcement of its new Cape Town-Durban route – as well as recent announcements of new domestic routes by other airlines – tourism specialist, Shaun van Eck, had this to say:

“It is really interesting. The current airlines flying into and out of Nelson Mandela Bay (PLZ), according to Acsa, are running on an average load factor of 97% with some of the highest flight prices in SA.

Does adding capacity to JNB/PLZ as a highly profitable route not make sense or is there a bit of 'collusion' to keep the profit margins up? It is significantly affecting our conferences, events and leisure tourism.

In fact, a National Minister was recently unable to get a flight to do a keynote address here! I could understand if there was a lack of demand from passengers but this is limiting the ability of our products to recover from the knocks of COVID.”