Face to Face: Rahel Assefa, Ethiopian Airlines
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We speak to Rahel Assefa, regional manager UK & Ireland at Ethiopian Airlines.
Ethiopian Airlines is currently running a tour of its Dreamliner, what are the plans for the aircraft when the tour has been completed?
We are extremely pleased and proud to be the first African airline to operate this ‘game changing’ aircraft, offering superior travel experience for passengers and substantial cost savings for us. In total we have ten on order; one has arrived already with the second expected this week and three more by the end of the year. The Dreamliners will serve our Washington-Addis Ababa route for the next two months and will then serve some of our African and Asian routes.
Do you have plans to use the aircraft on your London route? If not, are there any plans to update the product or service on the London route in the future?
UK is a key growth market for us – with our six-weekly flights to Addis Ababa offering 40+ onward connections to Africa, the potential is huge. Last year, we upgraded our London flights to B767s and I am hoping we will be able to permanently bring the B787 to London at some stage next year.
What ratio of your London route is UK tourists?
I would say around 30-40% of our traffic from U.K can be classed as tourists. Africa’s economic and infrastructural growth is contributing nicely to the overall tourism growth which is great news.
How has Ethiopian’s network in Africa grown recently? Are any of these particularly popular with UK travellers?
We recently re-commenced our operation in to Somalia (Bebera) and also commenced services to Seychelles and Toronto earlier this year. We look forward to commencing services to Kuala Lumpur and Sao Paulo this year. From UK there is increased interest in our services to Seychelles along with Zanzibar, Mombasa, Kilimanjaro, Lusaka, and Kigali to name a few.
After the Dreamliner launch, what are the next developments at Ethiopian?
2011-12 have been very busy years for us. Besides starting several new destinations and incorporating our new fleet of aircraft (B737&777LRs) in to the network, we joined Star Alliance and a system wide customer service improvement programme was launched in early 2011 targeted at the entire workforce.
Our second B787 Dreamliner is expected this week, on order there are further 12 Airbus A350s, eight B787 Dreamliners, seven B737s and further four B777 freighters all of which will help us to continue pursuing our ‘Vision 2025’ plan. In this plan, we aim to drive Ethiopian as the most competitive and leading aviation group in Africa by providing safe, market driven and customer focused passenger and cargo transport, aviation operations, domestic and regional services by 2025.