Emirates was the first Middle Eastern airline to fly to South Africa, about 16 years ago, although it was the last to come to Cape Town, preferring to put on more flights to Johannesburg. Now, with international travel patterns changing and new markets opening, it has changed its approach.It is the first Middle Eastern airline to increase its number of Cape Town flights to two a day, and it has done so at a time of year when some other airlines either withdraw for the winter low season or reduce the number of flights. I thought at first that this was because our tourism authorities have campaigned to attract visitors from the Middle East in our winter, when temperatures in the Arabian Gulf soar to 40ºC or more and residents of the United Arab Emirates are in search of cooler weather. But it is more than that.

As Fouad Caunhye, Emirates’ regional manager for southern Africa, pointed out to me this week, our tourism market has expanded to attract visitors from China, South East Asia, the US and South America  all potentially huge markets. Emirates, which carries tourists and business people from all over the world by way of its home airport in Dubai, has seen the potential offered by thousands of new travellers in search of different destinations and is preparing to bring more of them here. As well as boosting our tourism market and providing more jobs it also gives us a wider choice of travel destinations and flights during the Cape winter when many of us visit the UK or continental Europe.

Lim Wei-Peng, Cape manager of Singapore Airlines, which flies to Cape Town all year round as well as to Johannesburg, told me a few months ago that more Chinese visitors were coming here. Now Caunhye tells me that, despite the detour they must make to come by way of Dubai, Chinese are in the top 10 of those coming with Emirates. The airline is targeting the Chinese market because of its size – Caunhye says that attracting only 10 percent of the travelling population would mean 10 million people.He said packages offered by the airline’s sister company, Emirates Holidays, which has opened an office in Johannesburg, were helping to bring them here.

Emirates has also adopted a different attitude towards our airports, which most other airlines regard as serving separate markets. According to Caunhye Emirates – so far the only international airline apart from Air Mauritius to fly into Durban – regards them all as serving one South African market. He points out that foreign tourists often arrive in Johannesburg and leave from Cape Town, and says that some now flight to Durban and explore the Eastern Cape coast. He also expects huge growth in tourism from India. But, he says, although Emirates has found an ethnic market to India from Durban, Indian tourists visiting this country usually go to Cape Town.
Although it expects to bring more nationalities to South Africa, Caunhye pointed out that the UK was still our main source market. Emirates brings large numbers of British people, not only because of its favourable pricing but because it flies to several different cities in England and Scotland. Some British people prefer to avoid having to travel by way of London, in the same way that Capetonians prefer not to change planes in Johannesburg.

Now for the bad news – South Africa is planning to introduce a carbon tax on flying as well as on business vehicles and new cars later this year. Giovanni Bisignani, director and chief executive of the International Air Transport Association  has written asking our finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, to abandon the idea, warning that it would seriously damage South Africa’s airline and tourism industries. Explaining that was against attempts to provide separate regional solutions for a worldwide problem, Bisignani pointed out that its membership, representing the majority of the world’s airlines, had set a target to reduce carbon emissions by 1.5 percent a year until 2020, to halt the net growth of emissions from 2020 and to bring emissions down to 50 percent of 2005 levels by 2050. He said the industry asked governments to support these targets rather than impose more taxes.