RwandAir in aggressive fleet, route expansion to ease Africa’s air connectivity

RwandAir, the national carrier of Rwanda said its growing expansion in Africa and beyond through codeshare and other partnerships is boosted by its desire to connect the continent with the rest of the world.

The disclosure was made by the Chief Commercial Officer of the carrier, Mr. Owie Best while addressing the media on the milestones achieved by the carrier in the past two decades of operations while announcing the return of the airline’s daily flights to Lagos from Kigali, Rwanda.

RwandAir currently operates five times a week but plans to increase to seven. Best stated that RwandAir, the national flag of Rwanda wants to improve connectivity and very much wants to implement it.

He said, “What we are doing is to ensure that we have traffic and connectivity in Africa. We realized it is easier for you to fly to Europe than for you to fly from one African country to another. For you to fly from one African country to another, most times you have to fly out of the continent. You find yourself flying to the Middle East to come back to the continent or you fly to Europe or UK only to come back to the continent. What we are trying to do is to improve this intra-connectivity.”

“That is what we started thinking about how we should identify these issues. We are so keen on improving Africa with airline partners. This is very strategic for us. If we cannot fly this there has to be a partner that is already there so we connect with that partner and can provide this. The driving force behind all of these actions is the need to advance intra-Africa connectivity. We need to be able to do so.”

“There is no need for people who want to go from Nigeria to Morocco or any part of Africa to leave the continent and come back again. That is completely unacceptable and that is why at RwandAir we want to know how we can do this.  We know we cannot go everywhere, it’s not possible to operate everywhere but we can do it through healthy partnerships. We cannot stand alone so we need to be able to operate with other partners, identify these partners, talk to these partners and have a strong integration even in Nigeria.”

He noted that RwandAir is very strategic in its network expansion by holding discussions with one or two Nigerian carriers for passenger distribution to the domestic market from anywhere in the world.

He however stated that the carrier cannot continue to expand if they do not add enough aircraft to the 14 it already has in its fleet, adding that the carrier is expanding its network every day with collaboration with many carriers that have strong networks as well.

“Today we are progressively expanding in the fleet and we want to be able to double it in the next five years. We don’t want to bring all the aircraft and dump them in one place; every year we keep bringing new aircraft and five years from now, we have doubled the aircraft and we have a lot of routes that we have earmarked for these aeroplanes.”

“Today, we operate five times to Lagos and we want to do every day of the week. As of last year, we were operating five or six times to London but today we are doing daily. Any of the flights you take in Nigeria today you can connect to London. It’s only an hour and thirty minutes you have to stay to be connected.  It’s not that you are dropped and you’d have to wait for a long time before you continue your journey. As soon as you get there you are connected. We have a very healthy, robust transit desk”.

As soon as you arrive you are connected to your next flight. Before you sit down you are informed that the next flight is boarding. From Kigali to Europe, we have A330 and offer a completely flat bed that you can sleep and when you arrive at your location you are fully rested.

Wole Shadare