Previously my business trips used to be from Asia to Europe, but today I travel increasingly to Africa - just in order to discover how bad the Oneworld connections are within the African continent.

It is amazing that Oneworld seems to be very reluctant to expand. No new members have been welcomed for years (even if Malev and Air Berlin "passed away" in the meantime). Why not let Royal Air Maroc join? Or Namibia Airways? Or even Rwandair? It is virtually impossible to travel on Oneworld carriers within the African continent!

Yes, some Oneworld carriers like BA and QR do fly also to other destinations in Africa and not only to JNB. But still in terms of connecting OW flights - at least outside of South Africa - even these carriers have very little to offer.

Back in the day (over a dozen years ago), BA actually had more than one franchise partner in Africa.

In addition to Comair, there was "Regional Air" based in Nairobi, with service to/from quite some other places, including a daily JNB-NBO rotation, which allowed construction of quite some routings wholly within Africa. If I recall correctly, network included such places as Asmara, Djibouti, Lilongwe, Mombasa, and certainly some others I can'r remember.

Doesn't excuse the poor network today - but at least shows it hasn't always been so isolated on the OneWorld routemap...

Royal Air Maroc is under discussion apparently. In general though OW had not chosen to add weak regional members anywhere in the world. There are several reasons for that historically including IT philosophy (i.e., one of the stated reasons Air Lingus left). Also there are few African airline candidates that would expand the route map outside of a narrow silo. You would need to add a half a dozen airlines do that and even then it probably would not get you from, for example, Malawi to Botswana every day with reasonable connections and reliability.

There is money to be made in the trans-African airline market but the low hanging fruit is elsewhere.

Then you should fly Star Alliance then.

It�s not cheap to join oneworld. Maybe none of those carriers are willing to pay the annual fee.

"Let" them join implies they are clamouring to do so..... Maybe they have their own reasons for not being interested?

I don't think any of the Alliances have good coverage everywhere.... zero domestic *A coverage in Australia for instance... NONE.

I am flying both.

Lots in Africa with RAM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...c_destinations