Late last year, Montie Brewer, a former Air Canada president and ceo, gave a presentation entitled ‘Five Reasons Why the Airline Industry Will Never be Profitable” at MIT. Here are the five reasons:

1.  It’s a capacity-led business model (which causes constant overcapacity)
The deregulation and subsequent commoditisation of airlines means the only way for an airline […]

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It’s a haunting sound when a train groans and grinds into the station and then settles with a sigh at the platform. More haunting when it’s the last tourist train between Johannesburg and Hoedspruit.

The train I’m talking about is the Premier Classe, a delightfully old-fashioned overnight ride as well as the most relaxing, picturesque and absolutely the cheapest […]

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The whispers are circulating – Department of Transport DG,  Mpumi Mpofu (wife of controversial ex-SABC ceo Dali Mpofu) is currently the hot favourite to succeed Khaya Ngqula, as CEO of SAA. Mpofu has just resigned from the DoT, which could be an indicator she’s the hot tip, although she has denied in media she will […]

An article entitled “Saving SAA”, Business Day (June 5) praised SAA for “shaving off”  R2,5bn in cost savings, “all of which, as acting CEO Chris Smyth points out, are sustainable and have been incorporated into the day-to-day operation of the airline”. Smyth says, because of these cost-savings measures, on a purely operational level, SAA is […]

For all those of you, who like me, have been pondering over the abruptness of the disappearance of the doomed Air France flight AF447, and asking yourselves why, in this age of high technology, there seemed to be so much difficulty in locating the wreckage, here is an interesting piece from Innovation Analysis Group (IAG) Blog http://iagblog.blogspot.com/. Please note, this […]

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When Delta ceo, Richard Anderson recently jumped on the “agents-pay-airlines” bandwagon, saying he supported a similar vision to that of Richard Arpey, American Airlines’ ceo, (Arpey said he dreams of the day when travel agents and GDSs pay airlines for access to their content, rather than the reverse – (see previous blog post below) the US travel […]

The latest cannonball in the three-way airline-GDS-travel agent war whistled into the US retail travel agent camp on April 16, when Travel Weekly reported that American Airlines ceo, Gerald Arpey’s dream scenario is one in which travel agents pay the airline for allowing them to sell its tickets.

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Questioned about distribution-cost-savings, Arpey spoke of “reversing the […]

Interesting comment in The Times (the SA Newspaper), March 20, reflecting the cynicism of the SAA board allegedly awarding the airline’s outgoing ceo a multi-million Rand settlement (amount undisclosed) just after the carrier receives yet another rescue package from government. It had asked for R5,2bn, but got only R1,6bn.

 “The state is no longer willing to allow […]

     Although our national carrier has been flying for 75 years, it seems that whatever SAA does, it just cannot get itself off the ropes and into the ring. Here are some of the left jabs, straight rights, left hooks, and combinations that have left the airline reeling… �
1. Is SAA solvent? �
SAA’s debts currently exceed its […]

When the oil price reached its dizzy peak in July last year, airlines were forced to finally junk their old, fuel-inefficient aircraft. This brought two benefits – huge fuel cost-savings and a big reduction in capacity (in the US, a 14% capacity drop is anticipated during 2009).
 In the US, where swift and sweeping capacity cuts […]