Kenya Airways, the country’s national carrier and Alitalia, the flag carrier of Italy, which are both partners in the SkyTeam Airline Alliance have signed a codeshare agreement to boost business travel and tourism between the two regions.
The agreement will offer enhanced connections to Europe through Rome, to 16 domestic Italian destinations and 11 international destinations. The move will give tourists and businessmen more travel options through the two airlines’ hubs in Rome and Nairobi. Kenya Airways is set to inaugurate its four-weekly service between Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi and Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Fiumicino, Rome in June but people were allowed to buy their tickets through the airlines’ reservation systems and travel agencies from February.
Thanks to the codeshare agreement, Alitalia will apply its ‘AZ’ code on many services operated by Kenya Airways beyond Nairobi to Mombasa and Kisumu in Kenya, as well as to a further 19 African destinations, such as Abidjan (Ivory Coast); Accra (Ghana); Addis Ababa (Ethiopia); Antananarivo (Madagascar); Brazzaville (Congo); Dar Es Salaam, Kilimanjaro and Zanzibar (Tanzania); Douala (Cameroon); Johannesburg (South Africa); Kigali (Rwanda); Khartoum (Sudan); Kinshasa and Lubumbashi (Democratic Republic of Congo); Lagos (Nigeria); Maputo and Nampula (Mozambique); Moroni-Hahaya (Comoros); Seychelles
Additionally, the Italian flag carrier will operate direct services to Johannesburg, Casablanca, Algiers, Tunis and Cairo, by placing its “AZ” flight code on Kenya Airways’ new service between Rome and Nairobi. On the other, Kenya Airways will expand its offer to Italy and Europe by placing its ‘KQ’ flight code on Alitalia’s services.
This comes a year after KQ became the first airline in East African Community to offer a non-stop direct flight from the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York city, United States.
