We thanked
our lucky stars flying out to London last Thursday night, the first day of the
SAA strike. We had booked BA. It’s much cheaper than flying SAA.
The British
carrier was packed to the gills: there wasn’t a seat to be had from first-class
to business and economy, said ground staff. SAA passengers rebooked themselves
or the national carrier had to make plans for its clients who had to be
somewhere – which, when you think about it, is almost everybody with a booked
flight.
An airline
strike is a maximum disruption, which is why they usually make headline news
when they happen. The television images of stranded passengers lying on airport
floors stuck far away from home (or their destination) speak to the power of
trade unions to ground planes, the great birds of the sky.
But last
week on leaving and this week on getting back, the strike was barely noticeable
at OR Tambo, the Johannesburg international airport. The routes into and out of
South Africa (especially the Johannesburg-London and Cape Town-London flights)
are so lucrative that a range of airlines fly them.
To get to
London, you can fly BA, Virgin and SAA. If you don’t mind a layover, Emirates
and Qatar are good value, and so is Ethiopian Airlines, which is quickly
replacing SAA as the continent’s leading carrier. In the absence of SAA, if you
need to fly on our continent, you can use Ethiopian, Kenya Airways or RwandAir,
in addition to SA Express, the regional airline which was not on strike.
And
domestically, SAA’s market share of 56% has steadily been whittled down by
Comair and its budget operator, Kulula, as well as by the nimble FlySafair, all
three of which have proven wily competitors, even faced by the highly
subsidised SAA.
Barriers to
entry into the low-cost airline market are still high, but the strike this week
was more muted than it might have been because there is so much competition. The
SAA monopoly has largely been broken by competition. A study for the National
Treasury showed how, when FlySafair entered the market, prices came down significantly
as it created triangular competition. Eleven airlines hit the skids in the
Noughties, according to the study, but Comair and FlySafair seem to be
well-captained and sustainable.
A badly
treated passenger does not come back
SAA CEO
Zuks Ramasia thanked patient passengers this week, but there may not be so many
of those left. Last year, SAA bumped me off a long-haul flight, and when I
tried to use the coupon they gave me to fly again, the customer services number
rung off the hook for about an hour.
That was me
gone. The competition is better and cheaper, and while I had been a patriotic
flyer, believing that it was part of my national duty to fly SAA (plus the
staff are really nice) - no longer. I guess it will be much the same with most
passengers, disrupted by the strike this week or made nervous by the negative
headlines and Numsa’s threats against passenger safety. You don’t play with
flying and safety, and the market moves on, as I guess it did in great numbers
this week.
Convenience
went down; risk went up. SAA has eaten itself up. Unlike a strike at a factory
or a mine, the audience or stakeholders available for disruption by labour are
not static or captive in an airline strike beyond the single disrupted flight.
Thereafter, you can move and my guess is we have. In droves.
The risk
for SAA now is that the hard rump of its full-fare paying customers –
corporates and individuals – are largely gone, and that its captive market of
government employees and politicians remain.
If you look
at SAA’s ticketing structure, politicians get a wad of free flights for
themselves and families from SAA (or from taxpayers) while government
departments get highly discounted prices. The free flights explain why Public
Enterprises Pravin Gordhan got a dressing down from the ANC caucus this week
for his comment that SAA is not too big to fail. Who else will fly them with
families for free all around the country? Perhaps a dodo.
There’s a
big ideological free-for-all happening about whether or not SAA should exist.
But the people who really matter – the paying passengers – have flown the
cuckoo nest.