Bookings open for SA’s new airline
The cabin crew will be kitted out in outfits from online retailer Superbalist. Morning coffee from Vida e Caffè will be served.
Trendy new airline Lift opens its website on Tuesday for bookings from December 10, flying the Joburg-Cape Town and JoburgGeorge routes — and it plans to transform the customer experience, according to former Comair joint CEO Gidon Novick, who is the face of the new airline.
Its liftoff comes just as Kulula switches on its ticket sales again as it emerges from Comair’s business rescue process to launch flights from December 1.
The two airlines will add much-needed capacity going into SA’s summer holiday season. And FlySafair — which has been operating 76% of SA’s domestic seat capacity — has welcomed the prospect.
“It’s great for us, for the market and for SA, that our competitors, old and new, are coming in with more seats,” said FlySafair head of sales and distribution Kirby Gordon.
Lift is a collaboration between longestablished airline leasing company Global Aviation and Novick. Global will operate, crew and maintain the new airline under its existing licence, while Novick and his team look after the marketing and the customers.
Global Aviation CEO Quentin Tomaselli said: “We’ve been an agile support service to airlines around the world for 20 years. Lift is a natural extension into the local airline industry. The collaboration with Gidon and his team allows us to focus on safe and reliable flight operations while leveraging off their commercial experience and expertise.
“They are obsessed with building a customer service culture. The teams have come together beautifully.”
Novick said Lift’s basic proposition for customers was the idea of flexibility: “Anyone who travels with us will have a fully flexible ticket and will be able to change their flight as many times as they want to without fees. Our hypothesis is that with that in mind, peoplewill become more comfortable to book, and less anxious about travelling.”
The airline’s pricing will be competitive, but it doesn’t plan to undercut competitors or start a race to the bottom: “We will focus our efforts on adding value, not cutting prices,” said Novick. “We want to redefine the customer journey from start to finish.”
Spearheading this is former Uber SubSaharan Africa head of operations Jonathan Ayache, who brings to Lift what he has learnt from seven years at Uber.
Novick said Lift will initially operate three aircraft (Global flies the 180-seater Airbus A320s), doing up to seven return flights a day on the Cape Town and George routes, but if there is huge demand it can flex capacity to meet it. And with thousands of aircraft, pilots and cabin crew grounded internationally because of the Covid crisis, it’s easy to scale up if necessary to meet demand.
The flexibility for customers reflects Lift’s agile business model, which can be ramped up or ramped down according to demand.
Novick said the traditional supply-driven model is flawed: “It takes airlines down into the debt trap and increases their risk profile; it doesn’t have the shock absorbers you need in this volatile industry — and that’s played itself out over the past eight or nine months as airlines have failed globally and in SA. The model is ripe for disruption.”
Lift will have a low fixed-cost base and no debt, and a flexible staffing and resourcing structure. It will use Global’s existing infrastructure, aircraft, maintenance facilities, cabin crew and pilots and its central flight control facility, leveraging off Global’s long experience in providing full-service leasing for bespoke charters or to other airlines (Comair included) when they needed backup planes.
One of its main businesses has been leasing aircraft to European operators over the busy European summer. Lift gives it an opportunity to complement that by using those
aircraft over the busy summer season in SA.
Part of Lift’s customer proposition is also that it will keep customers’ payments in a separate structure until after the flights are flown — to avoid them losing money in the event the airline goes bust. This is a departure from industry norms globally.
Novick has been a vocal critic of the government’s latest South African Airways bailout: “It’s our basic belief that customers should not fund airlines and neither should governments,” he said. “No rational argument has been put forward that gives anybody confidence that it is necessary to put money into SAA that should have been invested in social projects and health care.”
Comair’s reopening of Kulula sales to some customers on Thursday came after the consortium that offered to buy the airline out of business rescue obtained approval for the deal from the competition authorities and from the lenders providing debt financing.
Sales were open exclusively for Vitality customers for the first 72 hours. It is not yet clear if or when the airline will start flying domestic flights under the British Airways banner again, with talks with BA continuing.
With SAA, SA Express and Comair in business rescue, just four domestic airlines have been flying as SA has reopened to domestic travel in recent months — FlySafair, SA Airlink, CemAir and Mango.
There have been concerns that capacity would not be sufficient for a busy December holiday season. FlySafair’s Gordon said demand is hard to estimate because the trend since airlines started flying after the lockdown was that booking curves had become incredibly short, with most sales happening only at the last minute.