South African Airways and Etihad Airlines have agreed to further deepen their bonds by way of increasing the number of flights including addition of new routes for codeshare flights. A daily service will be launched between Johannesburg and Abu Dhabi by the end of March next year by SAA. With these flights, there will be a twice-daily flight schedule to two cities among Etihad and SAA.

To further enlarge the reach of passengers from South Africa, Emirates would also be offering more than 1000 connections from its hub in Abu Dhabi to destinations spread across countries in Indian Subcontinent, Middle East, GCC, South East Asia and North Asia.

At the same time, these two carriers have also beefed up their codeshare agreement by almost doubling the number of routes that will be served by their flights. These now include 49 routes. The division goes like this. Emirates will place its ‘EY’ code on SAA’s new flights from Johannesburg to Abu Dhabi and, in addition, will also put it on 16 other services to key destinations in Africa from Johannesburg. On it part, SAA will put its ‘SA’ code on 32 Etihad Airways routes beyond Abu Dhabi.