South African Airways (SAA) will from this morning offer some of the lowest fares offered in the past five years. The airline will slash fares by up to 40% on some fare classes across 35 destinations across its domestic, regional and inter-continental network for select dates. Sale fares will be available immediately across all SAA distribution channels, including flyssaa.com, travel agents, city town offices and other points of sale. The 72 hour promotion ends on 28 February at midnight, South African time, and this promotion does not include code shares.

“The sale is designed to stimulate travel,” says SAA Chief Commercial Officer Sylvain Bosc. “Importantly inbound travel will be positively impacted as part-intention of the special offer is to stimulate inbound tourism during a highly favourable exchange rate period for international visitors.” The airline expects thousands of seats to be sold within the first few hours of the promotion. “We have increased capacity on flysaa.com to appropriately manage demand along with real-time monitoring to ensure access to the sale is effortless.”

SAA is one of Africa’s premium airlines and was this year awarded its thirteenth consecutive four star rating by airline ratings agency Skytrax. “The airline connects more African destinations to global markets than any other carrier,” adds Bosc, “and through our growing network and code-share partnerships South Africa remains one of the most globally connected sub-Saharan airlines.” The sale includes network destinations domestically, regionally, into the rest of Africa such as Entebbe and Nairobi, as well as internationally such as Munich, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and London among others.