FIFI PETERS: The Competition Commission has a warned airlines not to take advantage of the suspension of Comair by raising their own prices. This follows a report that a single plane ticket to Cape Town cost R5 000 following the suspension of British Airways and Kulula flights at the weekend. We have Kirby Gordon, the chief marketing officer at FlySafair, [with us] for more on this story. Kirby, thanks so much for your time. Just how has the suspension of Comair’s flights broadly affected your operations?
KIRBY GORDON: Evening, Fifi, and evening to the listeners. Thanks so much for the opportunity to chat with you again. Look, it’s been an incredibly tumultuous time in domestic aviation in South Africa. Airports, as you can imagine, have been awash with customers who have been stranded and desperate to try to get from A to B, as they need to. The reality is that Comair, between the two brands, operates about 40% of the domestic seat capacity. So effectively what happened on Saturday, when the airlines were grounded, was that four in every 10 passengers who were travelling anywhere were suddenly without any kind of carriage, and as a result were effectively stranded, and four in every 10 seats were removed from the market. So you can imagine that was a massive upset.
FIFI PETERS: What did that mean for your pricing, just having to come perhaps into the market to try and plug the gap that was left by the suspending of Comair?
KIRBY GORDON: To be honest with you, it doesn’t really mean a lot for our pricing at all. What it does mean is that, as airlines do across the world, we sell our first seats at the low [end of the price scale, due to consumer demand for those seats, while later seats are generally] more expensive. So when we closed our doors at the head office on Friday afternoon, we had set five seats at R2 000, five seats at R2 500, five seats at R3 000 – whatever the case may be. That’s how they sold throughout the weekend. Those price…
