News this past week that we should brace for airline seat shortages in December is a death knell for the upcoming festive season.
Families hoping to enjoy a mini-break from Johannesburg to Cape Town during the third-term school holiday were disappointed last week when airline seats were as elusive as coal to fire our hobbled Eskom plants.
And Kirby Gordon, chief marketing officer at FlySafair, told Business Times the same demand is expected at the end of the year.
The shortage speaks to an aviation industry that is in mayday mode from the after-effects of Covid-19 restrictions, fuel delivery delays and sky-high price rises — prices are almost double what they were last year.
The closures of Comair/Kulula, Mango, SA Express and Air Namibia have grounded budget-conscious travellers.
Aviation expert Linden Birns told Business Times the Airports Company SA showed signs of recovery, having reduced its 2020 loss by more than half to R1bn in 2021/2022.
However, the operator’s “state-owned cousins were attributable for a large portion of its absent footfall and, therefore, its revenue shortfall”.
The downsizing of our country’s national carrier and glaring absence of its subsidiary and sister operator, which were throttled by captains of state capture, has also meant bumpy conditions for our fragile domestic tourism industry.
The hike in jet fuel — and refining capacity limitations in the country and the continent — means we have to dig deeper to pay for imported fuel and road or rail distribution costs to storage depots.
An additional burden we had to bear, when civil unrest broke out in July 2021 and Mother Nature wreaked havoc on the logistics chain in April, drove costs higher.
This ultimately puts the short plane ride to the coast out of reach for the average family of four. The alternative is for them to travel by road, which spells disaster.
When transport minister Fikile Mbalula announced a horrific 14% increase in road deaths during the 2021/2022 festive season compared to 2020/2021, the Automobile Association (AA) cautioned the figure will increase unless real, effective amendments are made to road safety practices.
They predicted the toll of 1,685 victims of human error, speeding, drunk driving and unroadworthy vehicles will be overtaken unless there is urgent intervention that focuses on road safety education, more extensive traffic law enforcement and better prosecution of offenders.
According to the AA, we have already missed an international pledge to reduce road fatalities by half by 2030 as part of the worldwide 50BY30 Campaign we signed at the third Ministerial Conference on Road Safety in Stockholm, Sweden, in early 2020.
And judging by the increased freight operators hogging the lanes of our national highways and a substantial associated hike in truck crashes and fatalities this year, our pledge to provide safer roads is as stalled as Mr Fixit’s Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences Act (Aarto) and its driving licence points-demerit system.
A Pretoria high court ruling declared the act invalid and unconstitutional in January and found in favour of civil rights action group Outa, which challenged Aarto’s constitutional validity.
Outa and the AA have criticised Aarto for being geared to revenue collection instead of promoting road safety, with the AA saying it was a waste of taxpayers’ money which had done nothing to remedy SA's shocking road deaths rate.
At the time, Mbalula said he would challenge the ruling that put the brakes on the system, but meanwhile the festive season approaches with the prospect of even more traffic on our roads.
The good news is that airlines seem to be scrambling to meet demand and the possibility of competitive pricing to capture a fair amount of that market share is on the horizon.
But as the UN’s campaign says, road deaths and serious injuries are not just unfortunate accidents. They are predictable, preventable and unacceptable.
Our minister needs to put foot to make good on the pledge to curb fatalities, for the sake of saving lives and reviving our wounded tourism economy.
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