Air Mauritius is planning to increase frequencies to daily to Mumbai and double daily to Johannesburg and establish Kuala Lumpur as an East Asian hub part of its plan to provide better connectivity between Africa and Asia.
Speaking during the Routes Africa conference in the Seychelles, Jagessur Dhunputh, Senior Manager Planning at Air Mauritius, said the island flag carrier was hoping to go beyond the 10 services a week planned to the South African city and increase services to Mumbai. “We are operating four flights at the moment to Mumbai and the plan is to go daily as soon as possible,” he said.
With European traffic suffering during the downturn, Dhunputh said the carrier is now carrying out a strategic realignment, with less services to Europe and more to Asia. Kuala Lumpur International Airport is to become a hub for East Asia operations with its codeshare flights with Malaysian Airlines to be boosted with the launch of three of its own direct flights from this winter.
“We want to promote the Africa-Asia axis as this is where the growth is, we have reviewed our plans, first we have reviewed whole hub structure which allows flights to Africa and Asia,” he said.
Services to Europe on the other hand have been trimmed from six points to two – Paris CDG and London Heathrow – where the airline plans to “leverage on those two hubs to be able to get more European traffic” Dhunputh said. “There is more and more Indian tourists coming into the country, but we are still primarily a leisure destination and we need to look at ways of increasing our outbound markets. We are also trying to get into the Chinese market with the launch of services to Shanghai in July.”
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