Flights between Johannesburg and Cape Town will cost about R200 until the end of December on board South Africa’s new domestic airline, Mango, it was announced in Johannesburg on Monday.
”We are getting South Africans to travel,” said Mango’s newly appointed CEO Nico Bezuidenhout.
He said online ticket bookings will open at midnight on www.flymango.com and telephone bookings at 5.30am on Tuesday on 08611-MANGO.
The airline’s first flight will be on November 15.
Bezuidenhout expected ticket prices later on to remain 20% lower than anything else on the market.
Mango was also looking at creative ways for people to pay for tickets — including via retail clothing or food companies. Those details will be made known in a few weeks.
He said the airline was leasing two Boeing 737 800s from South African Airways (SAA) at the moment.
Its fleet will expand to four aircraft by December, when the carrier hopes to be operating 28 flights a day between Johannesburg and Cape Town.
It plans to extend its service to flights between Durban and Bloemfontein, and Bloemfontein and Cape Town by later next year.
”If consumer demand exists, we will expand these routes,” said Bezuidenhout, who brings to the operating his ticketing experience gleaned at SAA, as chief operating officer at Ticketweb and as a director of Africa Concession Management.
He said Mango’s aircraft will put in 12-and-a-half hours’ flying time a day, carrying 186 passengers at a time — substantially more than its competitors.
They have cried foul, complaining that Mango — run by a subsidiary of SAA — is unfair competition and that SA Express is supposed to be SAA’s low-cost carrier.
However, Mango’s new board stressed that it complied with competition regulations and questioned detractors’ ”motivation”.
Mango will provide a travel opportunity for many South Africans who had never flown before, Bezuidenhout said.
He said that even though the aircraft will be putting in long hours, they were ”new generation”; safe and reliable.
They will be flown by pilots with on average 15 years’ experience and maintained by SAA’s technical services.
”At no point in time will [we] compromise safety,” he said.
Although the high flying times will contribute to cost savings, Mango will be so much cheaper primarily because the aircraft being used are 10% more fuel efficient than the others in use and because of the higher seat density.
Snacks and drinks will be for sale on board and excess baggage will be billable.
Bezuidenhout would not go into detail about Mango’s lease agreement with SAA, but said it was based on ”market rates”, as was the provision of technical services.
He said Mango was an independent company. The extent of SAA’s involvement was a R100-million shareholder loan. — Sapa