An interesting... SAA drops its Cape Town to Durban route

Image from flysaa.com

SAA has anounced that it will no longer be operating its Durban-Cape Town route anymore and will use Mango, its low-cost carrier, to service it instead.

Twitter has already gone mad about it today, as has the comment section beneath the article I linked to above. People find it odd (some find it offensive) that the national carrier won't be flying between the 2nd richest city in the country (Durban) and the third richest (Cape Town) anymore, but there is a case to be made for SAA making this decision.

Firstly, as stated in the article, most of the traffic between the two cities is holiday traffic. Something one will notice, on occassion, is that many holiday destination to holiday destination flight routes fail. If there is not enough business traffic to maintain the commercial viability of a flight route then it has to be pulled. Does anyone remember the failed venture of having flights between Cape Town and Miami? No business travel = fail. Business travel is undeniably important, particularly for a full-service airline (as opposed to low-cost - SAA and BA are full-service airlines, Kulula, 1Time and Mango are low-cost airlines) and it's why JNB-CPT and JNB-DUR are two of the busiest flight routes in the world.

Secondly, we often complain about the excessive wastage of money spent by parastatals. This was a difficult decision made by SAA to concentrate on its more-money-making routes throughout Africa. For the first time I can think of off the top of my head, taxpayers are complaining about a parastatal wasting LESS of their money. We can't just have a flight route because we sommer want one. If, according to the capitalist principles espoused by the readers of the site I linked to above, there is a viable business route between Cape Town and Durban, someone will step in and fill it.

Thirdly, there are four other airlines from which to choose, and if you are a businessman who MUST sit in the snooty part of an aeroplane, then fly British Airways. It's really not that much harder to type in ba.com rather than flysaa.com and it's a tiny bit more expensive, but you're expensing it anyway.

An interesting... SA travel recommendation.

Something quite astonishing about South Africa is the reams and bucket-loads of places to visit, which are remarkably different.

For example, one can explore the dry Karoo, or go further south and connect up with the Garden Route.

A dusty and cold Johannesburg winter can be offset by the always humid, always moist Durban “winter” season where, kicking and screaming, those poor sods have to miserably bear temperatures which drop below 20 degrees for the week during which the winter hits its tumultuous peak (You can easily tell; the ice in your Jack & Coke doesn’t melt as fast as it usually does).

The wailing humidity and constant Vaalie-infested December heat in KZN can be dodged with a simple trip back the other way, towards the Highveld shopping district, where less humid but glorious thunderstormy weather can be located in Jozi or Pretoria – which are desolate every year between 16 December and the week before school starts as the locals flood toward the coast and piss off all the KZNers by driving at the actual speed limit.


And then there’s glorious Cape Town. Beautiful Cape Town. The Mother City. Wonderful Cape Town. Nowadays, I hear, one requires a passport to enter as the foreigners who own it all want to keep the South Africans out (exclusivity is key for celebrities). Lucky Michael Jackson died, so it is improbable that anyone is going to purchase Table Mountain anytime soon. The weather there is nice if you are English, or don’t actually know what happens the other side of the clouds. Oops! My bad. I forget there is a summer in CPT which is when all the foreigners come to stay in their swanky Camps Bay mansions and the rest of us are priced out. God forbid we get to buy things at normal value in rands. At least there’s always tik at a decent price.

You could always just go to and stay in Johannesburg, where the traffic ensures a brilliant chance to chill and do nothing for two hours as you attempt to navigate the four kilometres between you and 34789 shopping centres, where all you need is moisturising cream to sooth the perpetually dry skin you are bound to have.

If the big cities aren’t your thing, try Pietermaritzburg. You may have seen it on the way to Durban. You most definitely have a record of it in your mail box if you’ve driven through because of the confounding average speed cameras which ping you for going over 100kph. I have made a bigger contribution to the national GNP navigating that portion of the N3 than to SARS.

Why not PE? Maybe because of the thundering wind that never goddam stops. I can’t believe it is even safe to land a plane there. The runway, surely, must be wider than the entire set of six runways in Amsterdam. You would have to drive there to be safe. In a heavy car. Like a truck. Carrying concrete. And lead anvils.

Then there’s always the picturesque happy town of Knysna, so stunning you actually feel better just looking at it. And then you prance over the hot beach sand toward the Indian Ocean, and dip your toe into the sea as you gaze upon the scenic cliffs names The Heads. Then you realise the temperature of the water there and immediately phone 10111 before you eventually die of hypothermia.

Rather avoid that by going to nearby Plettenberg Bay, where you will be able to discuss, in depth, the crime in Johannesburg with all the eGoli expats.