Good news for those seeking flights to Kenya ahead of the upcoming winter season.
The country's transport authorities have granted new licenses to companies to fly to Mombasa and are considering adding more stopover options, despite the fact that this decision may hurt the flag carrier Kenya Airways.

The decision has matured within the Ministry of Transport, to activate the famous "Open Sky Policy," advocated by the coastal tourism sector, to allow all companies that request it, to choose Mombasa as their destination and allow Kenya Airways to do the same.
Evidently, until now, the Kenyan airline's top management has not thought that such reciprocity would favor them, to the detriment of other companies that have more resources and resourcefulness.

In fact, one of the companies that have asked to be allowed to step up flights to Mombasa is Ethiopian Airlines, which, as reported by the business daily Business Daily, just in recent days was granted permission to increase the frequency of round trips from Addis Ababa to the Kenyan coastal city. This could allow Ethiopians to intensify connections to Europe as well.

It is a first sign, but certainly not enough. In fact, as Business Daily reports, the governors of the Coast counties, Abdulswamad Nassir (Mombasa), Gideon Mung'aro (Kilifi), and Andrew Mwadime (Taita Taveta), and hotelier associations have been pushing for the implementation of the policy to fully recover the tourism sector to fill the region's more than 40,000 beds and create jobs.
According to tourism experts, the policy of unrestricted open skies is the only way to return to the charter and scheduled flight traffic of years past, when 16 daily flights were reached in the peak season, and also the way not to continue losing tourists to other destinations that are more convenient and cheaper to reach, foremost among them, Zanzibar.