South African Airlines honours travel, tour operators
The awards held on June 23 were to recognise the contributions of the players in the industry for their contribution to the success and revenue growth of the airline.
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Award categories
In the Excellence award category, SATGURU Travel and Tour received a platinum award in recognition of the company’s outstanding performance as the number one agent.
STELLAR Travel Limited was also received a platinum award for its outstanding performance as the number two agent for the airline.
In the gold and silver award categories respectively, FJ Travel and Tour and YOSHIKEN Travel and Tour were honoured as fast growing agents. For bronze, WAKANOW.Com Ghana Limited emerged the winner.
For the Ivory award, the prize went to Land Tours as the outstanding performer, Accra/Washington route.
The Pioneer Honorary awards went to Journeymax Executive Travels Limited, Expertravel and Tours, Graceland Travel and Tours, EuroTour Ghana Limited.
The airline also presented award certificates to about nine other players in the industry for their varied roles.
Gratitude
The Country Manager of SAA, Ms Gloria Yirenkyi, expressed glowing tribute to the tour operators and in particular, the award winners and expressed the willingness of the airline to serve them and their clients even better.
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“We are confident that with your excellent partnership and support, SAA’s impressive route network, enhanced inflight experience and customer focused service delivery, you will put us ahead of competition by choosing SAA for best connectivity of flights across southern Africa and beyond,” she said.
She also announced that passengers flying from Accra to Washington DC are to experience the comfort of a brand new large-body aircraft acquired by SAA, the only African airline flying direct from Ghana to the United States of America.
The airline, she said, has recently acquired five brand new generation Airbus330-300 aircrafts of which Ghana was one of the few routes on the SAA network selected to fly the wide body aircraft consistently on the Washington route.
“This implies that the four times Accra-IAD service and four times morning flights between Accra – J’burg will be enjoying this new experience,” Ms Yirenkyi said.
“I am also delighted to announce that SAA has completed the required systems set up for credit card payment processing on the BSPLink which will go live in July 2017; Work is in progress with IT systems set up for commercial codeshare partnership with our local partner AWA Airlines, which will enable the sale of SAA long haul flights from regional markets on their regional network expansion plan for the year of which Abuja will soon launch,” Ms Yirenkyi added.
Ticket payments
She said SAA had entered into a partnership with Ecobank through the launch of a joint credit card linked to the accrual and redemption structure of the airline’s frequent flyer reward programme (Voyager).
“This is worth mentioning because of the added value of earning double miles from the card usage and also for flying the tickets purchased with the card and I recommend to you to promote this with your corporates and clientele,” she said.
Ms Yirenkyi also acknowledged the partnership between the airline and Stanbic Bank, saying “Stanbic Bank Ghana is sincerely appreciated, having dedicated this year as the customers’ year by lending support for customers business activations and promotions is very commendable; Stanbic has proven to be a good stakeholder in our business and could definitely be a good partner to your business as well.” — GB