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Egypt Air, Wakanow in new deal to boost travel, tourism
- Firm initiates pay-small-small travel plan, carrier increases frequencies, eyes P’H route
Egypt Air and Nigeria’s fastest-growing travel company, Wakanow has entered into a partnership that would help promote tourism travel between Nigeria and Egypt.
The partnership will see Egypt Air open City Ticketing Offices through the Wakanow Travel Center network across Nigeria enabling their plans to expand operations further into the Northern and Southern parts of Nigeria.
Part of the partnership is the launch of new offices to give their customers easy access to their services leveraging the strength of their partners.
A visibly elated Chief Executive Officer of Wakanow, Mr. Adebayo Adedeji who described the partnership as an enhancement for the company told Aviation Metric said it allows them to leverage the power of Egypt Air to provide service to customers.
“As Egypt Air is ready to serve its customers, we are providing the services with our technology know-how and our footprint to help Egypt Air service its customers. At the end of the day, these customers are Egypt Air’s customers and we are just providing the services to take care of them”, he said.
With Egypt Air’s new centre at Wakanow Opebi, Lagos office,, customers can come to the centre with their families to go to Egypt for the procurement of their visas. The centre becomes not just for Egypt Air but also for Egypt travel completely and also.
Adedeji further said, “Visa is the gateway of travel, especially for people with green passports and providing this service. You can buy your ticket and proceed to get your visa here and you can go across and get your hotel in one building.
“You can get your tours too in this one building and also a ride from here to take you to the airport. Somebody can pick you up from the airport in Cairo and take you to your hotel. You can get 360 benefits if you come to this one building for all your travel needs”.
Asked if the partnership is a game-changer in the travel industry, the Wakanow boss said that the concept is not the game-changer but the “Game”.
“For us, we are not trying to change the game because we are innovating and not competing which is amazing. I will tell you why we are not competing because innovation does not need competition. Innovation is driven by thinking about the customer and taking care of them.
“For us, Egypt Air is ready to take care of the customer. I will tell you what Egypt Air did. Egypt Air introduced us to Karnak, Egypt Air formed a relationship with Karnak by allowing us to do Visas on arrival.
“The difference between us and anybody else is that we just don’t talk the talk, we walk the walk. Oftentimes, anybody can come up with innovation, can you execute it? What we do is flawless execution to do the right things and take care of the customer”.
To further make travel affordable to many people in Nigeria, Wakanow stated that it had opened a package to Dubai so that people can start by paying in installment in what it called, Pay Small Small”. between now and the time of travel later in the year.
“We have 26 outlets across the nation. He is going to Sokoto. We will be in Sokoto before he gets there. I am in Kano, Abuja, Port-Harcourt, Owerri, Enugu, Aba, Abeokuta. In Lagos alone, we have about eight centres. The strength of Wakanow is our ground footprint and ability to leverage our ground footprint for the customers. At the end of the day, the most important element in the business is the customer and what Egypt Air is trying to do is to reach the customers faster”, he added.
Egypt Air Country Manager, Mr. Muharam Abdel Rahman said its tourism sector is seeing rapid improvement after the unrest of January 2011.
He noted that after the crises of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is very important to encourage people to take to travel again.
“What Mr. Bayo is saying is that he is combining tickets, visas, destinations. This is how to encourage people to travel to encourage the industry of travel and tourism.”
“ It is not like before, we all suffering in the travel industry because the number of people travelling is not what it used to be in 2019 and the only way to encourage people to leave their homes and travel is to have a lot of fun and this is what we are trying to solve with this partnership with WakaNow by allowing people to get visa on arrival. Now, Wakanow has invested more money on this. People can now get their visa on arrival with packages about sightseeing among others”, he said.
Abdel Rahman disclosed that Egypt Air was planning to increase its frequencies from ten weekly flights, stressing that the carrier currently operates to Kano, Abuja, and Lagos, while Port-Harcourt is in their plan as well.
His words, “Now, we are flying from two points from Kano and Abuja. We have three flights from Kano and four from Abuja and we have a daily flight from Lagos. We are planning to increase our frequency from Lagos to 10 frequencies and Abuja to daily and four flights from Kano and looking at Port-Harcourt in the future”
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