The Legal Impacts of COVID-19 in the Travel, Tourism and Hospitality Industry

Many African airlines are highly reliant on the Far East for several things. Chinese investors have ploughed money into African aviation infrastructure and have made finance options available to airlines for everything – from aircraft purchasing to route expansion. Strong Sino-African trade has led several African airlines to start operating flights to China, which has left them exposed to the impact of the coronavirus. Overall, intercontinental flights are still the livelihood of Africa’s aviation industry, making up 51% of their business. On average, the revenue of airlines in Africa derive 5% from Chinese flights and another 7% from flights to the Asia-Pacific region. As such, airlines are highly exposed to both the cancellation of these routes and the drop in demand. Kenya Airways and RwandAir have both suspended flights to and from China until further notice, as has neighbouring Air Tanzania. However, one airline is still flying, and that’s Ethiopian, which has been widely criticised for not dropping the routes temporarily. Despite maintaining the routes, Ethiopian has been suffering just as any other airline has due to the general drop in demand for travel. The airline’s CEO, Tewolde Gebbre Mariam, told Reuters, “ The air travel demand for Ethiopian Airlines has declined by 20% due to the corona (…) It is a big shock .” Of course, it is not just the Chinese routes that are in jeopardy. Some airlines also fly to other badly hit areas, and as such have had to cancel flights. Kenya Airways and Cape Verdean Airlines, for example, ceased its direct flights to the Northern Italian cities of Verona and Milan. Abderahmane Berthe, Secretary-General of the African Airlines Association (AFRAA), told a media briefing in Nairobi that the suspension of China routes was already negatively affecting the revenue of some airlines, while the overall demand for international travel has been significantly reduced. In his opinion, airlines should redeploy their aircraft onto inter-African routes not affected by the pandemic. However, that relies on no African countries having a widespread outbreak. One of the major factors affecting Africa, aside from its Far East connections, will be the prevalence of the disease in its own nations. As we have seen with other outbreak epicentres, a high penetration of confirmed cases could lead other countries to shut their borders to African carriers. At the time of writing, the worst-hit countries are Egypt with, Algeria and South Africa. Other nations with cases include Senegal, Togo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, DRC, Tunisia and Morocco.