I briefly listened to the relevant parts of the podcast, they did not say that ITA won't be a competitor to SN, in fact they point for point stated the obvious and similar views that ITA's FCO hub is much better positioned to serve Africa more efficiently and at a lower cost than SN, so it will be interesting to see how the LH Group develops this, and I too wonder how the German-Italian cooperation is going to be as the Italian government will undoubtedly push for more African routes.rwandan-flyer wrote: ↑04 Feb 2025, 09:43 I suggest you to listen the last AviaDev Africa podcast. I put the link yesterday.
They explain why ITA uses A321Neos on Africa, and why the adding of more A330s is good for Brussels Airlines.
With the coming of more A330s, Brussels Airlines will able to split some services. Transit demand via Brussels and point to point demand to and from Brussels are enough to provide non stop service in the both ways to and from Dakar, Kinshasa, Nairobi, Abidjan and probably a little bit Kigali
It means more cargo and more pax for these destinations because city tagged doesn't cannibalize your loads.
To Nairobi or Dakar, it's better for Brussels Airlines to sell all its 293 seats instead to sell 146 seats for Nairobi and 146 seats for Kigali (BRU-KGL-NBO), or to sell its 293 seats to DSS iso 190 seats for Dakar and 103 seats for Banjul (BRU-DSS-BJL). On some days it's probably better for SN to sell more 200 seats to Kigali, etc...
Also probably the airline will able to increase flights on some (probably new) tag services such as Brussels Freetown Monrovia or Brussels Banjul Conakry.
Then with more capacity to Africa, United Airlines and Air Canada which play a big role to eed SN flights to and from Africa can bring more capacites during peak period to Brussels. More extra flights on some days.
ITA will probably use their A321Neos on some niche markets. According to the experts (it's their opinions not a project from ITA) after Dakar and Accra only Abidjan and probably Kinsahsa could be served both by SN and ITA. ITA will focus on leisure market in East Africa (Mombasa, Zanzibar or Kilimanjdaro) and VFR to West Africa (Lagos). For the moment about Africa, ITA is mainly focused on point to point market btw Italy and Africa with of course some connecitng with Europe and N America. Except Senegal, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana and probably DR Congo or Ivory Coast, Italy has less point to point market demand with Sub-Saharan Africa than Belgium
ITA won't have 30 A321Neos in their fleet. Only 10, when you think that some of them fly also to Europe and Midde East, their capacity in term of deployment will be limited
rwandan-flyer wrote: ↑03 Feb 2025, 18:38 The 1st podcast of 2025. They talk about Brussels Airlines and its expansion into Africa. A little teasing from our experts. They are quite optimistics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K29iSfsO9c8
One expert says that with more A330s coming, SN could serve some leisures destinations in East Africa (Zanzibar, Mombasa, Seychelles) in Winter when they operate less flights to North America. One expoert is not agree about to start flights to Seychelles
United Airlines and Air Canada play a big role to feed SN flights to Africa. In Europe, France is the top market for feeding SN flights to Africa
Brussels City has good point to point demand on some SN destionations in Africa (Dakar, Kinshasa, Douala or Kigali). It helps the airline to have a good load factor.
The arrival of more A330s will help the airline to split some services and add more flights on some destinations.
For them, ITA won't be a competitor in Africa, with the A321LR they will focus on some niche markets. Many of them are not served by SN: Zanzibar, Mombasa, Kilimandjaro or Lagos. Only Abidjan is served by SN.
Welcome to the first edition of the AviaDev Insight Africa Connectivity update for 2025, hosted by Jon Howell, CEO and Founder of AviaDev Africa.
This month's guests are: Sean Mendis, Aviation Consultant.
Behramjee Ghadially, Aviation Consultant.
In this bumper episode, we cover the following stories:
Ethiopian Airlines to launch Hyderabad 3 x week from June
If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to the podcast to never miss another episode and share this episode with someone in your network who would benefit from listening.
Ethiopian Airlines to launch Hyderabad 3 x week from JuneI agree that ITA already has a busy schedule plan for its subfleet of A321NEO's; so they would need more to expand into Africa.
I don't think that they will have trouble adding a handful of A321NEO's on relatively short notice of <3 years, hasn't Wizzair just deferred 75 A321NEO deliveries because they realized they were overambitious (obviously that's not what their PR said)? Expect something similar with overambitious Indigo (6E), as soon as the A320CEO's are gone as they complete their 12 year lease cycles, they're going to start crawling back and delaying deliveries because they ordered more than they will be able to finance, let alone operate. It's one thing receiving 25-30 deliveries per year, it's a totally different ball game when Airbus starts sending them a NEO every week, they won't be able to keep up and with Airbus ramping up A320 production, it won't be long before they get there.
Again, this rollover won't happen overnight, it will be a route by route type thing and I also see some routes getting duplicated for a while to see who does best and who knows, if SN can push AF-KLM out of some routes, they may even operate some routes alongside eachother, at least for a while. This is an opportunity for LH to give AF-KLM the Coup de Grace in Africa and kick them out of the market, but they will have to have a very meticulous plan and execute meticulously and SNwill also have to convince them that they can execute their part of the plan.
If SN want to stay in the Africa business, they will have to show creativity and inventiveness.
One option they have is to have a serious conversation with Eurostar and see if they can get semi-dedicated Eurostar service from Paris and London into BRU, the same way CDG and AMS have long used TGV and IC trains to suck traffic away from Belgium. IC trains from The Netherlands now always stop in BRU which is excellent already, but they can do more and putting BRU at 1.5 hours from Paris will be a huge selling point.
SN also have the option to strengthen their TATL portfolio and seriously look at A321NEO TATL routes so they can reduce costs and become more competitive than Discover, EW but more importantly to hold on to US-Africa traffic they have built as there is no way the A321XLR would be able to fly US-FCO non-stop, so they can compensate a lower efficiency of widebody operations on the BRU-Africa segments by a higher efficiency TATL operation.
They can also look into finding ways to coordinate with NH to offer Africa connections and a more premium experience to/from Japan for the Japanese executives and diplomats as FCO only has a daily ITA flight to HND and it's already packed to the gills and not timed well to connect to Africa.
I'm floating free advice here.
SN hasn't grown much in Africa in the past 15years.
This time they need to be much more proactive only to keep what they have built so far or else FCO will run away with it.
