Tebogo Tsimane has spent 24 years at South African Airways (SAA), starting behind a reservations desk—issuing manual paper tickets and negotiating with angry passengers—before working his way through operations, station management (including a posting in London) and eventually into the commercial leadership seat he occupies today. He still keeps a paper ticket in his office as a reminder of how far the industry has come.
That career arc, toggling between operations and commercial, shapes how he thinks.
“I’ve always been moving from commercial to operations and back,” he said during a wide-ranging conversation at WiT Africa in Cape Town. “Understanding both sides means you know exactly where the cost and the customer experience intersect.”
Right now, that intersection is under enormous pressure.
The Middle East crisis: A fuel shock with a silver lining
The conflict in the Middle East has hit SAA from two directions. The direct impact is through its codeshare relationship with Emirates. The indirect impact—and the more painful one—is a jet fuel price hike of more than 150%.
“We’ve constructed a watchlist of flights we think we could save on fuel by consolidating. And then some of the routes we expected to be quiet are sitting at 100% load factors.”
The reason for those full planes? Passenger routing. Travelers from the northern hemisphere who would normally transit through Middle Eastern hubs are now finding their way to southern destinations—including South Africa—via different corridors.
SAA’s Johannesburg-to-Perth service, for example, is now full, and the airline is looking at adding frequencies. “There’s been some win,” Tsimane admitted. “We haven’t seen a decline in overall demand, more a shifting of demand.”
But the fuel cost is relentless. “Airlines operate on such thin margins. When your fuel cost goes up by 150%, every day is just talking about survival – how you conserve liquidity. That’s what we do every day.”
No stranger to crisis
SAA is no stranger to existential pressure. It went through business rescue in 2020, emerging with a cleaned-up balance sheet but deeply scarred supplier relationships. Tsimane was part of the team that restarted the airline in 2021. He is unsentimental about what that experience taught.
Don’t fight for market share for its own sake—except for one rule: if you’re going to win, you cannot be number three.”
Tebogo Tsimane, South African Airways
“Before business rescue, we had an unsustainable debt burden. During COVID, there was no demand at all. When we restarted, the one thing we did not have was that debt—but suppliers were not kind to us.”
The lesson, he said, was discipline: “Count the pennies. Go only to markets where you are strongest. Don’t fight for market share for its own sake—except for one rule: if you’re going to win, you cannot be number three.”
This Middle East crisis is different—a cost shock rather than a demand collapse or a debt spiral. But the response draws on the same muscle memory: ruthless prioritization and liquidity management.
Strategy: Look east and towards West Africa
Asked whether the conflict opens a lane for SAA to step in where Middle Eastern carriers are constrained, Tsimane was blunt. “Anyone who thinks this is an opportunity for us to replace the Middle Eastern carriers is dreaming. We’re not going to do that.”
SAA’s ambition, he reiterated, is to be the best connector within Africa and to operate a sustainable long-haul network—not to become a global transit hub.
What the crisis has done, he said, is validate a strategic direction SAA had already chosen: eastward expansion. The airline is planning to grow its network towards China, Hong Kong, India and is doubling down on its Australia corridor. Its Johannesburg–Mumbai route, launched recently, is part of that vision.
“The forecast has been right: the way to go is to the east. We’ll park the western and European expansion for now.”
On West Africa—identified in OAG data as a flat market for South African connectivity—Tsimane sees untapped potential. “The demand is there. We’re looking at increasing frequencies on current West Africa routes, opening new ones, and operating some of those routes out of Cape Town rather than just Johannesburg.”
He also cited the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM), as a structural enabler if its implementation accelerates, allowing SAA to connect city pairs across the continent that currently force passengers to route via European hubs.
Technology: Playing catch-up
Tsimane was candid about SAA’s digital maturity. “The honest answer is: not much—because we had to do a catch-up first.”
Coming out of business rescue, the airline’s legacy systems—its Amadeus PSS, its Voyager loyalty platform, its mobile app and website—needed significant upgrading before any conversation about NDC or modern retailing could begin. “You can’t talk about NDC if your foundational platforms aren’t right.”
That work is largely done or underway. The mobile app now drives around 50% self-service check-ins—a number Tsimane is proud of. The website, through which SAA currently converts about 30% of bookings directly, is being enhanced to facilitate more direct sales and ancillary revenue. His target: two-thirds of bookings coming direct.
The next frontier is artificial intelligence (AI)-powered revenue management. “Our current system requires a lot of human intervention. We’re looking at how to integrate AI so it’s more dynamic and less manual.”
But the Middle East crisis has pushed those initiatives to the back burner. “All these projects are still there—we just need to survive first, and then we’ll get back to them.”
The travel agency problem and a creative fix
One persistent headache is SAA’s highly concentrated travel agency market. Around 70% of bookings flow through agencies, which means SAA often doesn’t hold passenger contact details. In a disruption scenario—and SAA’s irregular operations tool, “15Below,” currently only reaches about 30% of affected passengers—the airline can’t proactively communicate with the rest.
The solution, Tsimane said, is not to fight the agencies but to work through them. "I’ve made peace with the fact that they’re not going away, and I’m not strong enough to tell them to leave.”
SAA is deploying Amadeus Travel DNA as a mechanism to create a passenger contact database, still owned by agencies but accessible enough that SAA can push disruption alerts. “Quite a number of travel partners have already started giving us contact details. Very soon, I think we’ll be able to reach more than 50% of passengers.”
Open skies by 2045? Two things need to happen
On the conference’s broader theme—whether Africa can achieve open skies by 2045—Tsimane was both optimistic and realistic. “By 2045 I’ll no longer be in the industry, so it will happen,” he quipped. But then, more seriously: “Two things, not one.”
The first is addressing fragmentation through liberalization. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go further, go together. We are fragmented. SAATM and liberalization can fix that.”
The second, he argued, is more fundamental: cost. “For as long as travel is not affordable, Africa will remain at 2% of global aviation. This continent—its physical size, its disconnected communities—requires air travel more than almost anywhere else. But not at these prices.”
He ended with characteristic pragmatism. SAA is not trying to be the biggest. It is trying to survive, stay lean and be the most relevant connector between Africa and Asia. For now, that is more than enough of a mission.
This story originally appeared on WiT.