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Cape Town - Delta Air Lines has no plans for the foreseeable future to launch a new direct route from the US to Cape Town, Jimmy Eichelgruen, the airline's sales director for Africa, India and the Middle East, said on Tuesday.
Speaking in Cape Town at an event to celebrate Delta's decade of flying in Africa, Eichelgruen said: "We see Cape Town mainly as a leisure destination - for a route to be profitable, we need to fill both the front and the back ends." As South Africa's commercial hub, Johannesburg fits the bill nicely and the airline doesn't see this changing anytime soon, said Eichelgruen.
In addition to Johannesburg, Delta flies nonstop to three destinations in Africa: Accra in Ghana, Dakar in Senegal, and Lagos in Nigeria. The airline has a reservations/ticketing and sales office in Cape Town as well as a number of additional markets on the continent, including Kenya and Uganda.
Over the past ten years, Delta has flown 1.6 million passengers between Johannesburg and North America, with its first flight landing in the Golden City on December 5 2006 from Atlanta in the US via Dakar.
"Delta has invested billions of dollars to enhance the service we offer our customers in Africa and across the globe since our inaugural flights here," said Eichelgruen. The airline has operated 22 000 flights between Africa and the US over the past decade and is the only carrier to offer Wi-Fi on every flight.
