South African Airways (SAA) Interim Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kgokolo says the airline has increased the number of passengers on both its domestic and regional routes since resuming flights in September.

Kgokolo says the Johannesburg-Cape Town route has achieved an average seating of 75% passenger load factor.

The airline’s regional routes are also showing signs of increased passenger numbers.

The airline has recently added Lagos to its African routes. Kgokolo was speaking on the sidelines of the SA-Kenya business forum under way in Pretoria.

“For us starting from a Business Rescue Practitioner, we are comfortable with that. What has been amazing is the regional routes, for example Accra on our 330, which is our biggest aircraft that we have, sometimes we leave Accra seating on 75% load factor.

So we have seen a general good sentiment. The only route we had challenge with was Mozambique, in fact, we are stopping doing that in the next coming months or so. But what we have done is that we are starting Lagos in December, have started Mauritius, we did out first flight and load factors are sitting at above 90%.”

SAA takes to the skies once again:


SAA says they will no longer be flying into areas where they are making losses.

“Our views about our networks and our routes are that we will change them as the market conditions change, we wont force fly to areas where we are making losses. We will be technical about it and the key is that we need to communicate that on time .

We don’t want a customer getting to the airport and being told no we are no longer flying to Mauritius because a COVID environment requires you to be agile, you have to be technical, you just can’t be rigid. But its not Christmas yet, we have a lot of work to do.”

SAA adds regional routes, flying to Zimbabwe and Zambia: