The distance between Dakar in Senegal and Freetown in Sierra Leone is about 500 miles — roughly the same as between D.C. and Montreal. But flying round trip between those two African capitals would often cost more than a thousand dollars and require multiple layovers.
This isn’t an outlier. Flights between major African cities are consistently more expensive than routes in other parts of the world. There’s nothing about the African continent that makes flying there inherently more expensive. The reason for the exorbitant costs is protectionist policies that undercut competition.
Demand for African passenger air travel is expected to double by 2040, but governments aren’t allowing supply to keep up. This is largely because of bilateral agreements that limit many international routes within Africa to only one carrier.
Even flights between major African cities often lead to otherwise impractical layovers in non-African locations with fewer airline regulations, such as traveling from Cairo to Johannesburg via Dubai. In some cases, countries have banned foreign carriers from operating routes even where no domestic carrier operated.
As a result, only a fifth of Africa’s air travel takes place within the continent, even in areas where city hubs are separated by thick jungle or instability that make rail or road travel infeasible.
Africa’s leaders treat the growing middle class of flyers primarily as a source of tax revenue. Average airfare taxes on the continent can reach over a third of ticket prices and are twice as high as in the wealthier Middle East.
In fact, some African governments charge premiums for foreign airlines to operate inside their borders. Others spend heavily to keep insolvent and even bankrupt state-run carriers alive, removing any incentive for companies to lower prices or offer better services.
Airline deregulation has proven successful in the West. In the European Union and the United States, deregulation resulted in more flights with lower fares. Similar results can be seen on some African routes, such as between South Africa andZambia.
African leaders have often paid lip service to the enormous benefits that would come from liberalizing the aviation industry. In 1999, more than 40 countries reached an agreement to remove restrictions on flights and standardize aviation rules. They reaffirmed these goals in 2018 by committing to the Single African Air Transport Market.
Yet most of the countries that signed onto that initiative still cling to protectionism.
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