New York-Lagos, which would not have garnered my wager as a likely candidate for such a premiere, is considered a highly lucrative market. “Our Lagos service will be highly attractive to Nigerian and American transatlantic travelers,” said Continental CEO Larry Kellner in a statement. “Particularly executives in energy-related industries.” The route was previously covered by the long-embattled Nigeria Airways, which finally closed its doors in 2003.
Nigeria, by the way, was ranked the world’s third most corrupt nation by a watchdog organization called Transparency International. The group says 40 percent of the country’s petroleum income is stolen or squandered by government corruption and mismanagement. Allegedly — though I can’t confirm this — one of the reasons British Airways ceased its London-Lagos flights was because its airplanes were routinely stripped of equipment, including galley supplies, furnishings and even cockpit electronics, during layovers. Rumors say armed guards will accompany crew and passengers on Continental’s flights from Newark.
Although travel to Africa has been picking up for some of the accounts we handle, I don’t think any of them will be flying this route on Continental soon.
Or will they? They go where the money is.
Another blog mentioned that the facts in this story are highly questionable. link
Found the link via the “other blogs commenting” thing BB has on their posts. That’ll teach me to quote a travel-related post from BB without taking a quick check of schedules in SABRE. Stories about Nigeria, full of lurid detail about corruption, graft, and corporate crime, show up in my BBC News RSS feed pretty often. Thus it was pretty easy to imagine stripped planes and looting and armed guards being a normal cost of flying aircraft into there.
The other blog mentioned Continental’s facts were screwy about US airlines or other entities going into Africa – it sounded like the World Airways flights were a charter of some kind. That might make a difference, or make it easier to spin the facts to Continental’s advantage.