SA Airports ready for festive travel surge – ACSA

Airports Company South Africa has dismissed claims of a possible liquidation made by one of its service providers. The company says it’s all systems go for the festive season peak and it’s ready to welcome large volumes of travelers to its airports across the country.

The airport company experienced a jet fuel shortage last week leading to flight disruptions but says contingency plans and strategies are in place to deal with the busiest days of the year.

ACSA has also seen a 3% increase in passenger numbers in 2024. It says it is anticipating a busy festive season with measures in place to accommodate the high volumes at its facilities, after experiencing an increase of 3% in passenger numbers in the 2024 financial year to date.

ACSA GE Operations Terrence Delomoney says, “For this season, we are expecting more traffic than we’ve had in the last season and we see that domestically, we will be growing by 5% recovering pre-COVID international at 16% growth and recovering at 116% in terms of air traffic movement really a similar trend in air traffic movement always lead the recovery and we expect that for the winter season they will recover to 96% for that season. We are expecting to grow by 4% by the end of our financial year.”

Full capacity

The company says its airports including OR Tambo are operating at full capacity as investigation into last week’s jet fuel incident continues. It has allayed fears of a repeat disruption this festive season attributing what happened to a broken drive shaft valve that has since been submitted to labs for analysis as per ongoing investigations.

ACSA Regional Manager Jabulani Khambule explains, “Impacted flights are 413 flights split between arrivals and departure flights from the 10th hour which is from 10h00 in the morning when the incident happened, impacted passengers there were 50 209 passengers impacted and thus is a network not or Tambo alone, so it’s a network impact split into 25 000 departure passengers and 24 000 arriving passengers. 31 flights were cancelled throughout the network split between 17 arrivals and 14 departures. All the nine airports with impact, we are a network of 9 airports.”

ACSA says it’s still early to be taking liability for those who would want to be compensated for the inconvenience. ACSA CEO Mpumi Mpofu says, “We have no doubt about the inconvenience that was caused, we apologise profusely for that to members of the public but we will get to the bottom of it, the incident report is already out and coming back to the issue about insurance claims, we operate in a normal legal environment where the incident report together with the lab analysis will be submitted to our insurance companies and submitted to our legal department to really advise us on how we should proceed so that issue is very much integrally linked to the incident report and whether or not or how to proceed with payment as it’s been suggested will depend on the outcome of the report.”

The ACSA CEO has also dismissed claims of a financial crisis and going into liquidation after some service providers claimed to be owed monies for services rendered.

“We are not facing liquidation. We got our annual financial statements audited for the last year, we are in good financial position, we declared a profit that is not false that profit was audited by the Auditor General of South Africa, we have issued our financials. They are out in the public, you all know what they are, there is nothing to suggest that we are in financial trouble, more important we are in a good position said the Auditor General to settle our debt.”

SA Airports ready for festive surge: ACSA

ACSA says it is in recovery mode following approval of a 5-year tariff increase that starts at 4. 5% set to generate R21. 7 billion. All airports have also approved integrated multidisciplinary festive season operational plans on enhancing safety, and security with criminals and unruly passengers warned.

ACSA maintained that claims of liquidation remain baseless as it works on efficiency and solidifying operations as per the received tariff and financial management responsibilities.

It has promised a smooth peak season with its insurance looking at claims from the recent jet fuel incident.