Originally Posted by
NickB
Well, in terms of putting a posiitve gloss, I don't think that you would have anything to envy Alastair Campbell at the height of his spin doctoring days
. To borrow your phrase, "another way to look at it" is that if one excepts countries bordering the Mediterranean, BA serves only 7 of the 50 African countries (and that is including Mauritius and the Seychelles in there). And even if you include the Maghreb and Egypt, that only brings us to 10 out of 54.
Admittedly, Lufthansa's coverage in Africa is not stellar either but they have SN Brussels in the Lufthansa Group with extensive coverage of the continent. AF also has a fairly good coverage and the missing bits in Eastern Africa are covered by KL. There is no doubt that BA coverage of Africa is extremely poor and IB does not add much either and certainly does not compare to what is offered by its two competing European airline groups..
More globally, BA's Asian network is also limited, with minimalistic covering of China in particular, and its South American network is quite small too, although this is obviously where IB excels to complement BA so that is fully understandable. All in all, BA is an airline which is very heavily focused on the North Atlantic and IAG as a whole is a group whose intercontinental network is very heavily focused on transatlantic routes and is much weaker with respect to Asia and Africa.
One problem is that the UK is the wrong way in the sense of traffic going from Europe to Africa, or Europe to Asia (even though it can be argued that if folks fly through the ME or IST then why wouldn't they do the same with London?) One of my pet opinions has always been that the restrictive UK Visa regime definitely plays a part, if not for Africa certainly for Asia. I remember reading, and I cannot for the life of me find it again, that VIE had more Chinese arrivals than London. Rome definitely has more cities connecting directly to China than London. One Schengen visa gives access to 20-some countries, the UK Visa (which, I am told, is sometimes harder to get than the Schengen one) gives you only the UK! It all adds up I guess.
Plus, on a side note... if you look at the English-speaking countries in Africa, they're either all connected (Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya) or don't have the critical mass for a direct flight and are reachable through Doha (and even that, I'd say, ain't that much of a traffic - Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia) or through SA (Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia) or are frankly too small...