The African Airlines Association has partnered Sabre Network Solutions, a United-States-based airline global distribution system company, to inaugurate an Africa Route Network Cooperation Task Force with the aim of increasing intra-African flight frequencies, improving connectivity and offering flexibility to travellers.
Travelling in Africa today is much easier and more convenient than it was a few years ago, thanks to the intra-African spread of some of the continent’s carriers.
But the frequency of flights is still limited and the daily spread concentrated at peak times only.
Many of the airlines do not align their schedules with each other, resulting in missed connections, long layovers at airports and sometimes extra costs incurred in accommodating passengers in hotels.
According to AFRAA’s monthly bulletin for July, many African carriers currently optimise their own network but have limited coordination with other African carriers.
The airline body, however, said that changing this trend to a more cooperative, results-driven approach through schedule optimisation and code-share would deliver significant incremental revenue and benefits for airlines.
The AFRAA said that tapping into the expertise of Sabre Airline Solutions it hoped to ensure that the African airlines route networks were integrated and aligned to allow operators to generate both incremental traffic and revenue at minimal costs.”
“Sabre Airline Solutions will act as the independent third party consultant for the airlines, ensuring that the project is fully implemented and the benefit realised. The consulting firm has experience in implementing similar network cooperation projects for airlines in the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean,” according to AFRAA.
According to the bulletin, the team from Sabre Airlines Solutions overseeing the implementation of this project include the Head of Sales – Middle-East and Africa, Anick Leger; Consulting Delivery Manager, Mark Hess; and Solution Partner – Middle-East and Africa, Annika Akerman.
The AFRAA bulletin listed some of the benefits to include growing flights connectivity between African cities and between Africa and other regions by coordinating each carrier frequencies, day of operation, and departure time; developing the airline schedule on markets where the carriers have small or limited exposure; adding new destinations under the airline own code without operating the route.
Others are improving aircraft utilisation and use aircraft resources in new markets; enhancing elapse time on beyond markets to increase carriers market share; analysing new market opportunities by specific carrier and potential partners; reviewing opportunities to seasonally reduce schedules between two or more carriers in common markets.
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