Air Algérie Adds Airbus A330 Flights To Johannesburg

Source : https://simpleflying.com/air-algerie-airbus-a330-johannesburg/

North Africa’s Air Algérie has revealed three new African routes, per its latest schedule filing. Algiers to Addis Ababa, Johannesburg, and Libreville are coming. None has been operated regularly by any airline before. While each has minimal local demand, they were Algiers’s three largest unserved sub-Saharan African markets.

Three new Algiers routes

Details of the trio are as follows. Curiously, Algiers to Addis Ababa is 2,934 miles (4,721km) apart, making it only 2% shorter than the 3,000 miles (4,828km) considered to be long-haul.

Image: GCMap.

All are tiny markets

All three routes are tiny. According to booking data, Algiers-Addis Ababa had barely 3,500 roundtrip point-to-point passengers in 2019, a minuscule amount for what is virtually a long-haul route. No wonder Algiers, like all capitals of North African nations except Egypt, has been ignored by Ethiopian Airlines, even with its myriad onward connecting flights. But it was Libreville that was smallest, with fewer than 3,000 P2P passengers.

With about 9,000, Algiers-Johannesburg was the largest but still very small. Indeed, it is essential that, where possible, there’s a strong foundation of P2P demand to offset lower-yielding and higher-cost transit traffic. That doesn’t exist in the case of the three new routes, clearly undermining the business case.

Photo: Konstantin von Wedelstaedt via Wikimedia .

What about connections?

The three routes will rely on transit passengers. Analyzing Air Algiere’s schedules for mid-July using OAG data and assuming no more than a five-hour wait in Algiers shows where passengers can connect over Algiers. In the case of Addis Ababa, two-way connections are available to/from Geneva, Marseille, Milan Malpensa, Paris Orly, Paris CDG, and Rome. Johannesburg will connect to/from Brussels, Frankfurt, Istanbul, London Heathrow, Metz/Nancy, Milan Malpensa, Paris CDG, and Paris Orly. For Libreville: Basel, Brussels, Geneva, Lyon, Metz/Nancy, Milan Malpensa, Paris CDG, Paris Orly, and Rome. Consider Addis Ababa to Rome. On Saturdays, Rome-bound passengers will leave Ethiopia at 03:30 and arrive in Algeria at 08:25. They’ll wait for 2h 5m before flying to the Italian capital. On Mondays, those flying to Addis Ababa will depart Rome at 14:30 and arrive in Algiers at 15:20. They’ll take off to Ethiopia at 20:00.

Flying via Algiers adds 21% more miles to the journey. In contrast, flying EgyptAir over Cairo adds 9%, Turkish Airlines via Istanbul adds 12%, while it’s 29% with Qatar Airways over Doha. Of course, there are significant differences in passenger awareness, frequency of service, wait times, and product quality among these different options, influencing pricing and the potential market they’ll capture.

Nine sub-Saharan African airports

OAG shows that Air Algérie will serve nine airports in sub-Saharan Africa from Algiers next summer. There’s Abidjan, Addis Ababa, Bamako, Dakar, Johannesburg, Libreville, Niamey, Nouakchott, and Ouagadougou. Now that Addis, Johannesburg, and Libreville are coming, Algiers’s largest three unserved markets are now Luanda, N’Djamena, and Accra.