Mozambique and Angola are doing their tourism industries a huge disservice by restricting international flights into their cities, a new research report into liberalising air transport in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region says.
The report, which was prepared by Genesis Analytics for regional development initiative the ComMark Trust, says that if the Southern African region is to benefit from the huge number of tourists who will be visiting South Africa for the 2010 Soccer World Cup, countries have to start liberalising their air transport routes now.
Historically, governments in the region have limited the number of carriers and flights between countries in an attempt to protect their national airlines, but the report says the tourism benefits of cheaper and more frequent flights far outweigh any negative impact on national airlines.
The report, titled Clear Skies Over Southern Africa: The importance of air transport liberalisation for shared economic growth, predicts that liberalisation would result in more than 500 000 additional foreign tourists touring the region which could create up to 70 000 jobs in the wider SADC economy.
”These calculations demonstrate that countries in SADC are making significant — and, on the face of it, unwarranted — sacrifices by continuing to constrain their air transport markets,” says the report.
Genesis Analytics’s Andrew Myburg, who worked on the research report, says the 2010 Soccer World Cup is a huge opportunity for the SADC region and cheaper and more frequent flights are required if the region is going to maximise this opportunity. ”If Angola wants to get any tourists from 2010, they can’t keep offering three flights a week,” says Myburg. ”The same goes for Mozambique.”
The report points out that although both Durban and Maputo are roughly an hour’s flight from Johannesburg, the return flight to Maputo is 163% more expensive than a return flight to Durban.
Ticket prices to Mozambique are high because of tightly restricted competition on the Johannesburg-Maputo route that allows only South African Airways and Mozambique’s state-owned airline Linhas Aereas Mocambicanos (LAM) limited flights on the route.
The report predicts that liberalising the Johannesburg-Maputo route would lead to a drop in prices to closer to the cost of a Johannesburg-Durban flight, and would increase tourist arrivals to Mozambique by 37%.
The report estimates that this increase could create 3 000 additional jobs in Mozambique.
It acknowledges that while the Mozambican government wants to liberalise the country’s air transport market it faces opposition from vested interests within the country.
When air transport routes are liberalised it allows low-cost airlines such as Kulula and 1time to enter the market. These no-frills airlines drastically reduce ticket prices because they are operating off a low-cost base, and this in turn, boosts passenger volumes.
The report says the Johannesburg-Lusaka route demonstrates the potential impact of low-cost airlines. Three months after Kulula began flying this route passenger volumes had increased by 38% and air fares had dropped by 33%. The report predicts that the additional 6 300 tourists travelling to Zambia each year would result in an increased tourist spend of $8,9-million a year.