TRANSPORT-SENEGAL: New Airline Exceeds its Own Expectations

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Chris Simpson

DAKAR, May 3 2002 (IPS) - Fourteen months on from Air Senegal International’s inaugural flight, Director-General, Zouhair Mohamed El Aoufir, says the airline has far exceeded its own expectations.

“We are ahead of the business plan,” says El Aoufir. “In the first year we took 125,000 passengers, that’s 26 percent up on our business plan estimate. We had a turn over of CFA11.4 billion (17 million U.S. dollars), also far ahead of our estimates. And we are already flying to Paris, something we thought might take three or four years.”

ASI was formed in November 2000 in partnership with Morocco’s national carrier, Royal Air Maroc, which took a 51 percent shareholding in the new company.

Its predecessor, Air Senegal, had hit a series of problems in the 1990s, running up huge debts, going through a difficult restructuring programme and operating on only a handful of the routes it had licences for.

Air Senegal also suffered from a fractious relationship with the troubled continental carrier, Air Afrique, which was a minority shareholder. At the time it was put out to tender in late 1998, Air Senegal had two planes at its disposal, one of them a 24-year-old Twin Otter.

ASI has taken over the old sub-regional flight routes to Banjul (The Gambia), and Bissau (Guinea-Bissau), but has quickly expanded in West Africa and beyond. There are eight flights a week to Abidjan (Cote D’Ivoire), seven to Bamako (Mali), four to Conakry (Guinea).

ASI also serves Cotonou (Benin), Lome (Togo) and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). There are weekly flights to Casablanca in Morocco and also to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. El Aoufir says there is a memorandum of understanding with South African Airways to set up twice-weekly flights to Johannesburg.

The company is also looking at New York as a possible destination. “Dakar is the nearest point to the American continent in Africa,” says El Aoufir. “A lot of Afro-Americans want to come to Senegal for historical and cultural reasons. A lot of Senegalese go to the United States.”

At the end of March, ASI sent its first plane into Charles de Gaulle airport, with several Senegalese international footballers on board. ASI now flies Paris three times a week, offering a return fare of CFA340000 (around 520 U.S. dollars), markedly lower than that of Air France, which has traditionally dominated the Paris-Dakar route.

El Aoufir attributes ASI’s success to high standards of service and to its ability to plug gaps in the market.

“We have tried to go for international standards. So far 80 percent of our flights are on time. We have a product with a high level of quality and our clients tell us this is rare in this region.”

El Aoufir says he is personally saddened by the fall of Air Afrique, which was formally liquidated by a court in Abidjan on Apr 25, but says airlines have to obey key rules.

“Let’s think about how to manage a company. You have to think about a ratio, the number of people with the number of aircraft. You have got to look at your market and your capacity.”

The ASI chief hints that Air Afrique and other smaller airlines in the region failed to provide the service expected of them.

“Even when Air Afrique was up and running, there were serious gaps in the market. There were countries that were cut off, or where the service was feeble and irregular. There was no study made of how tariffs should be adjusted.”

El Aoufir says ASI’s emphasis on good training and working conditions and sensitivity to employees’ needs should prevent the kind of labour problems, which have plagued other airlines. “We are all in the same boat and we should be rowing in the same direction. That way we can overtake everyone.”

ASI has run a high profile advertising campaign in Senegal, highlighting new destinations and cheap fares. But smaller operators are trying to find a share of the market.

Aeroservices (ASF), an air charter company set up in 1996, is now advertising return flights from Dakar to Brussels at CFA320,000 (500 U.S. dollars). Aeroservices has so far run nine return flights to Belgium in co-operation with Belgian tour operator Atex Discovery.

The company’s Secretary General, El Hadj Omar Ba, says he anticipates onward flights from Brussels to Paris becoming part of the deal, while New York is in Aeroservice’s sights.

Omar Ba says that while Air Afrique’s demise left an obvious vacuum for operators, so too did the collapse of Belgian airline Sabena, now returning to Africa as Sn Brussels Airlines.

Omar Ba, who worked as a cash manager at Air Afrique between 1980 and 1985, echoes EL Aoufir of ASI’s criticism of the airline. “Air Afrique is dead because of its shareholders. The shareholders were customers who did not pay their tickets and when the company needed money, they had nothing to give. They were not guys with the competence to run an airline.”

Aeroservices is one of several companies offering cut-price offers for travel to Europe. Rival charter Senegalair is advertising return flights to Paris at CFA380,000 (580 U.S. dollars) from May 21.

Omar Ba says it is good to see skies opening up, but warns the market may be too small for all the competition. “We will have to make alliances. You can’t have 10 companies; you can have three or four. From an economic point of view, joint ventures are much more logical than wild competition.”

Omar Ba notes the return of the Belgian airline and the possibility of a revived Air Afrique resuming operations one day, but says the smaller companies can survive “if we are serious, if we are credible”.

He points out that the bigger airlines, including Air France, are already looking in the direction of lower fares, worried about the competition.

Ironically, according to Omar Ba, one of the main selling points of airlines like Air France is the conservatism of the African market and Africans customers’ reluctance to experiment with new operators.

“People don’t seem to realise that we have an AMCI scheme. That means we are hiring the aircraft, crew, maintenance and insurance. The plane is a Boeing 767, a DC10 or an airbus. Senegalese probably think there is no comparison with Air France, but they will see the plane is the same, the crew is the same and the fare is much cheaper,” he says.