Dubai’s Emirates, South African Airways reaffirm partnership to grow presence

Dubai-based Emirates has been working with South African Airways (SAA), to reactivate its partnership, aiming to provide more value to travellers when flying on both carriers.

The move also helps cement SAA’s position and will build growth momentum as the carrier initially restarts flights to six African destinations.

Emirates and SAA have been working towards increasing alignment across products, services and reactivation of synergies between loyalty programmes, and will be initially kicking off with a reciprocal commercial arrangement. This includes SAA coded and Emirates-operated routes between South Africa and Dubai on a single ticket, enabling travellers to check-in their bags to their final destinations from October 1. Emirates will also place the SAA code on major trunk routes between South Africa and Dubai.

Emirates had said earlier this month that it will be expanding its operations in and out of South Africa, boosting its schedule to 28 weekly flights by October.

Read: Dubai’s Emirates ramps up operations to South Africa

Adnan Kazim, chief commercial officer, Emirates Airline, said: “The partnership between Emirates and South African Airways builds on our shared commitment to providing customers more schedule choices and increased connectivity across Africa and through our growing network. We value our nearly 25 years of successful partnership with SAA and we are working hard to take more positive steps forward to continue to grow our relationship and provide our customers with even more connectivity in the future.”

“As SAA starts to rebuild, the long-standing partnership with Emirates is both valued and critical to our future growth plans,” adds SAA’s interim CEO Thomas Kgokolo.”We share the same vision of seamless, efficient, and excellent customer service with connectivity to multiple destinations. We are confident this partnership will lead to the addition of more route and destination options, particularly across Africa as we both recognise the economic, trade and tourism potential the continent has and our key role as enablers.”

Plans are also underway to expand cooperation and solidify the partnership on more domestic and regional points in Africa as SAA expands its operations, while Emirates will also reciprocally add more options for SAA customers to connect to select destinations within its network on one itinerary. The Emirates SAA partnership started in 1997, and over the last ten years more than a million passengers have flown across the joint network of both airlines, which grew to 110 destinations prior to the pandemic.