Emirates adds nine African routes with single-ticket travel through SAA

Emirates and South African Airways expand codeshare to nine African destinations

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Dubai: Emirates passengers can now book single-ticket journeys to nine additional destinations across South Africa and neighbouring countries following an expansion of the airline’s codeshare partnership with South African Airways.

The agreement gives travellers coordinated flight schedules and through-checked baggage to their final destination when connecting between Emirates and SAA services.

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Three domestic routes will connect Johannesburg with Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth, while six regional services will link the city with Kinshasa, Gaborone, Windhoek, Lusaka, Harare and Victoria Falls.

Tickets for the expanded routes are now available through Emirates, travel agents and the airline’s retail stores.

Emirates gains access to SAA routes

The airlines previously operated a unilateral codeshare arrangement, with SAA placing its code on Emirates flights between Dubai and Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.

SAA passengers also received interline access to 68 destinations across the Emirates network through Dubai.

Following regulatory approval, Emirates will now place its code on flights operated by SAA, extending its reach across domestic South African routes and six destinations in neighbouring countries.

Partnership approaches three decades

Emirates and South African Airways have worked together since 1997, making the relationship one of the longest-running airline partnerships in Emirates’ portfolio.

The expanded agreement responds to demand for travel to South Africa from international markets, particularly Europe, while providing passengers with more connections across southern and central Africa.

Emirates began serving South Africa in 1995 with flights to Johannesburg and later expanded its network to Cape Town and Durban.

The airline has carried more than 20 million passengers to and from South Africa and currently operates 56 weekly flights across the three cities.

Nivetha Dayanand is Assistant Business Editor at Gulf News, covering aviation, financial markets and commodities. A business and financial journalist with a strong interest in multimedia storytelling, she regularly takes complex financial and economic subjects beyond the written word, producing explainer videos that make them easier for a wider audience to understand. Nivetha has interviewed senior policymakers, business leaders and global financial figures both on and off camera. Her past guests include UAE Minister of Economy and Tourism Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri, Khaled bin Alwaleed Al Saud, a member of the House of Saud and the founder and CEO of KBW Ventures, Jihad Azour, Director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department at the International Monetary Fund and Indian ministers Hardeep Singh Puri and N. Chandrababu Naidu. She has also hosted and moderated panels, conferences and awards shows, bringing her newsroom experience to live conversations on business, finance and the economy. An Erasmus Mundus journalism alum, Nivetha is drawn to stories that affect people directly and to reporting that gives a platform to voices that might otherwise go unheard. She was among the first journalists to speak to Petrofac employees in the UAE about unpaid salaries, broke the news of the planned demolition of Dubai’s well-known “Toyota Building”, and helped set the record straight on widely circulated claims that a giant replica of the Moon was coming to Dubai. More recently, her exclusive interview with EDGE Group CEO Hamad Al Marar revealed how the UAE-based defence group deployed its systems along the country’s shore border and established a geofence around the UAE within 48 hours of the February 28 escalation. Prior to joining Gulf News, Nivetha worked at ITP Media, where she helped launch Finance Middle East, a new publication covering the region’s financial sector. Her role spanned reporting and editing, video production, interviews and events. Across print, digital, and video, she focuses on finding the people behind business stories and explaining why those stories matter to the audience reading or watching them.

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