Qantas Returns to South Africa

Qantas has resumed regular passenger flights to South Africa after a hiatus of almost two years, with 3x weekly Boeing 787-9 services on the Sydney-Johannesburg route.

Qantas flights QF63 from Sydney to Johannesburg, and the return QF64 back to Sydney, are now running on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays with the following schedule:

• QF63 Sydney 10:15 – Johannesburg 15:15
• QF64 Johannesburg 17:15 – Sydney 14:00 (+1 day)

Prior to COVID-19, Qantas had served this route 6x weekly using larger Boeing 747-400s (which have since been retired). While Qantas is now offering much less capacity to South Africa than previously, this is still a good step towards returning to “normal”.

From April 2020 until December 2021, Qantas services to Johannesburg were limited to the occasional repatriation charter flight. These typically operated from Johannesburg to Darwin, where arriving passengers would need to quarantine for two weeks at Howard Springs.

With struggling South African Airways no longer flying from Johannesburg to Perth, the Qantas Sydney-Johannesburg flights are now the only direct services between the Australian and African continents.

Before the restart of Qantas’ South African flights, the most direct way to get from Australia to Africa was via Singapore, Qatar or the United Arab Emirates – potentially a very long detour!

It’s not yet clear whether South African Airways, which reportedly plans to merge with Kenya Airways, will return to the Perth-Johannesburg route. But at this stage, South African Airways doesn’t have the aircraft to do so even if they wanted to. There is currently only one active wide-body aircraft in the South African Airways fleet – an Airbus A330-300 which is being used primarily on the Johannesburg-Accra and Johannesburg-Lagos routes.

To fill the void, it is possible that Qantas could announce its own Airbus A330 flights from Perth to Johannesburg over the coming months. Watch this space…

Very strong inbound demand from South Africa to Australia

Since restarting Sydney-Johannesburg flights on 4 January 2021, Qantas’ outbound services to South Africa have had reasonably solid passenger numbers. But almost every inbound flight from Johannesburg to Sydney appears to have been fully booked so far.

Inbound demand over the coming weeks and months also appears very strong, indicating huge pent-up demand for flights from southern Africa to Australia. The ongoing border closures throughout 2020 and 2021, combined with the recent Australian government ban on travel from southern Africa (due to the emergence of the Omicron variant) has likely contributed to this.

The ban on travel from South Africa to Australia was revoked last month, but some airlines have maintained their own restrictions a for longer period of time. For example, Qatar Airways will only resume accepting passengers departing from South Africa and neighbouring countries from tomorrow.

But the higher demand on inbound flights from South Africa is not a new phenomena. In fact, flights from South Africa to Australia have been consistently more full than flights in the other direction for well over a decade!

On average, from 2011 until 2020, BITRE data tells us that Qantas had an average load factor (percentage of seats occupied) from Sydney to Johannesburg of 78.49%. But in the opposite direction, from Johannesburg to Sydney, Qantas filled an average of 85.72% of seats! This means that over the past decade, on average, Qantas flights from South Africa returned with 26 more passengers than were flown to South Africa.

If we check the figures for South African Airways’ Perth-Johannesburg flights over the same period, the difference is not quite as statistically significant. But South African Airways also carried more passengers overall from South Africa to Australia (with a 73.62% load factor) compared to flights from Australia to South Africa (where the average load factor was 71.87%).

In total, this means 82,080 more passengers flew on direct inbound flights from South Africa to Australia between 2011 and 2020, compared to outbound flights. This is highly unusual as most airlines carry roughly the same amount of passengers in both directions, when looking at averages over an extended period of time.

This likely reflects the high level of net migration from South Africa to Australia. According to Home Affairs data, South Africa is the ninth-highest source of permanent migrants to Australia with around 43,170 South Africans settling permanently in Australia over the past decade. Considering around half of African migrants to Australia are from South Africa, we could assume that the additional ~39,000 net passengers who flew to Australia but didn’t return to South Africa (at least, not on a direct flight) came from other nearby countries.

Join the discussion on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum: Qantas quietly resumes flights to Johannesburg today

Matt Graham

The editor of Australian Frequent Flyer, Matt's passion for travel has taken him to over 70 countries… with the help of frequent flyer points, of course!
Matt's favourite destinations (so far) are Germany, Brazil & Kazakhstan. His interests include economics, aviation & foreign languages, and he has a soft spot for good food and red wine.

You can connect with Matt by posting on the Australian Frequent Flyer community forum and tagging @AFF Editor.