Africa’s airports are lagging behind their global counterparts in digitalisation – an issue exacerbated by the fact that airlines are often left out of any moves towards modernisation, resulting in solutions that are not fit-for-purpose.
This concern was raised during the recent WTM Africa session on “Delays, data breaches and dysfunction – Is Africa ready for seamless air travel” facilitated by Linden Birns, MD of Plane Talking, and Aaron Munetsi, CEO of the Airlines Association of Southern Africa. The talk explored the continent’s readiness for digital transformation in air travel.
Munetsi explained digitisation goes far beyond paperless tickets. “It’s about passengers interacting with the entire value chain from the airline to ground-handling, air navigation and airport operations as well as airlines understanding passengers’ needs and regulators ensuring safety and security.”
He said, when airports shut down during the pandemic, they were already dealing with outdated technology. Since reopening, they have been scrambling to meet new demands. Birns pointed out that some passengers aren’t even able to get a mobile boarding pass at major airports and asked Munetsi if he believes airports are doing enough to speed up this process.
“Definitely not,” said Munetsi. “We are nowhere near where we need to be. Passengers should be able to check in from home and go straight to the boarding gate.” The problem is just as bad upon arrival with passengers often queuing for 40-60 minutes at immigration after an eight-hour long-haul flight, he added. “It sends the wrong message about our readiness.”
A key issue is that almost all Africa’s 628 commercial airports are state-owned. “Governments often treat airports like border posts; not business environments,” said Munetsi. “They don’t see digitalisation as a competitive edge. So airlines end up investing in systems and then ask for concessions to recover those investments.”
Little hope
Speaking about digitisation and visas, Munetsi said African travellers still face costly, paper-based application processes and there is little hope that this will improve in the near future. Concerns persist about the security and integrity of African passports with some countries citing the ease of fraudulent acquisition as a key barrier to relaxing visa restrictions.
“First, we need to acknowledge we have a problem and then the second phase is determining the checks and balances we put in place to ensure passports are secure,” said Munetsi. Home Affairs or a border agency simply considers its perspective of the issue and leaves airlines out of the implemented solutions, which don’t solve the problem, he added.
“Only eight out of 55 African countries have signed up to the African Union’s free movement protocol,” said Munetsi. There have been some small wins like the KAZA visa, which allows visitors from several key inbound source markets to have free movement between Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana. But there has been very limited progress with similar initiatives, which is hindering intra-African travel. “Imagine if just 10% of Africa’s 1.5 billion people started travelling across borders. The impact would be enormous,” Munetsi said.
One obstacle is outsourced visa services. “Outsourcing was meant to reduce corruption but it’s created new channels of inefficiency and cost. Even digitisation efforts are sometimes blocked because they disrupt long-standing tender contracts for paper-based forms,” he added.
In air traffic navigation, the technology gap is widening. “Aircraft are modern digital systems but they’re still being guided by outdated, analogue infrastructure,” said Birns. “There’s no harmonisation of data exchange because governments. To preserve sovereign assets and geopolitics, we are shifting away from globalisation towards nationalism.”
