A new Zimbabwe registered airline, Rainbow, will as of Wednesday this week launch operations. A leased – from COMAir in South Africa – single-class Bombardier CRJ200 will commence flights between Harare and Victoria Falls, initially serving the route three times a week.
Owned by Zimbabwean investors, the new kid on the block is adding capacity to Victoria Falls alongside the scheduled flights of Air Zimbabwe and Fastjet.
It is understood that the airline also plans to add Johannesburg in February, again with initially 3 flights per week, before eventually expanding the service to daily.
Meanwhile, a usually well-informed source close to the Zimbabwe Civil Aviation Authority confirmed that more airlines will be adding stops at the new Victoria Falls International Airport, among them Ethiopian Airlines from March and Kenya Airways from April onwards.
These flights in particular are seen as key to bringing in more tourists to Zimbabwe in general and Victoria Falls in particular, which remains the number one tourism attraction in terms of numbers of visitors.
Both Kenya Airways and Ethiopian Airlines, through their respective hubs in Nairobi and Addis Ababa, can generate additional interest in Zimbabwe and make multi-country visits in Africa possible.
Kenya Airways already flies up to 3 times a day between Nairobi and Harare, and the addition of Victoria Falls – the airline also serves Livingstone/Zambia on the other side of the border – will be another key expansion of Kenya Airways’ Africa network.
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