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A look at the route that carried 3.4 million passengers in 2025 — and the other African corridors driving the continent’s air travel.
The route linking Cape Town International Airport and Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport has been named Africa’s busiest airport pair, carrying 3.4 million passengers in 2025. The figure comes from the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) newly released World Air Transport Statistics (WATS) report, an annual compilation drawing on data from more than 1,300 airlines, including over 250 international carriers.
The finding is not a surprise to anyone who has tried to book a seat on the route on a Friday afternoon. Cape Town and Johannesburg are South Africa’s two biggest economic and tourism hubs, and the corridor between them has functioned for years as the backbone of the country’s domestic aviation market.
“It comfortably outperformed every other airport pair on the continent.”
Why the route dominates
The corridor’s volume reflects several overlapping streams of demand. Johannesburg, as South Africa’s financial and industrial capital, generates constant business travel to and from Cape Town, the seat of Parliament and a major corporate and legal centre in its own right — a combination that keeps government officials and executives shuttling between the two cities year-round. Cape Town’s status as one of Africa’s leading leisure destinations adds a steady flow of holidaymakers, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere summer, while Johannesburg’s role as the country’s primary international gateway means many overseas visitors connect onward to Cape Town rather than flying there directly. Multiple airlines compete on the route, keeping frequencies high and fares competitive, which in turn supports further demand.
How it compares globally
Set against the rest of the world, the Cape Town–Johannesburg route is a significant flow but a modest one by global standards. The world’s busiest air route in 2025 was the domestic connection between South Korea’s Jeju International Airport and Seoul’s Gimpo International Airport, which carried 13.3 million passengers — close to four times the volume of its African counterpart. IATA’s data shows that nine of the world’s ten busiest airport pairs were in the Asia-Pacific region, with the only exception being the domestic route between Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah and Riyadh airports. By regional comparison, Latin America’s busiest pair — Bogotá to Medellín — carried a marginally higher 3.5 million passengers, while Europe’s busiest pair, Barcelona to Palma de Mallorca, carried 2.1 million, and North America’s busiest domestic pair, New York JFK to Los Angeles, carried 2.2 million.
A note on the data — and the rest of the list
IATA’s WATS report identifies only the single busiest airport pair in each world region; it does not publish an official passenger-ranked top ten for Africa, so there is no verified IATA figure for a ‘second busiest’ African route. To still give a sense of which other corridors carry the continent’s air traffic, the table below draws on a different, publicly available data source: scheduled flight frequency and seat-capacity data from OAG (the aviation data platform used throughout the industry) and airline schedule aggregators. This measures how often airlines fly a route and how many seats they offer — not how many passengers actually travelled, which is the metric IATA uses for its Cape Town–Johannesburg figure. The two are correlated but not identical, so treat the ranking below as an informed picture of Africa’s other busy corridors rather than an official passenger-count league table.
| # | Route | Type | Frequency | Why it’s busy |
| 1 | Johannesburg (OR Tambo) – Cape Town | South Africa (domestic) | ~91 flights/day combined | SA’s two economic and tourism anchors; the confirmed IATA #1 route in Africa |
| 2 | Johannesburg – Durban | South Africa (domestic) | ~76 flights/day combined | Third-largest SA city pair; heavy business and commuter traffic |
| 3 | Cairo – Jeddah | Egypt – Saudi Arabia (int’l) | ~64 flights/day combined | Africa’s busiest international corridor by seat capacity; driven by labour, religious and VFR travel |
| 4 | Zanzibar – Dar es Salaam | Tanzania (domestic) | ~59 flights/day combined | Tourism gateway route feeding Zanzibar’s beach resorts |
| 5 | Arusha/Kilimanjaro – Zanzibar | Tanzania (domestic) | ~54 flights/day combined | Safari-to-beach tourist circuit route |
| 6 | Lagos – Abuja | Nigeria (domestic) | ~47 flights/day combined | Nigeria’s busiest domestic corridor, roughly 28% of all Lagos departures |
| 7 | Mombasa – Nairobi | Kenya (domestic) | ~40 flights/day combined | Coastal tourism route and Kenya’s main air corridor |
| 8 | Cape Town – Durban | South Africa (domestic) | ~28 flights/day combined | Secondary leg of South Africa’s coastal triangle |
| 9 | Johannesburg – Harare | South Africa – Zimbabwe (int’l) | ~26 flights/day combined | Busiest air link between South Africa and its northern neighbour |
| 10 | Johannesburg – Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha) | South Africa (domestic) | ~24 flights/day combined | Connects Johannesburg to South Africa’s automotive-industry hub |
Frequency figures are approximate combined (both-direction) scheduled daily departures, based on airline schedule data current as of mid-2026, and will shift with seasonal capacity changes. This list is a secondary, capacity-based picture and is not part of IATA’s WATS report.
The bigger picture
Two patterns stand out. First, South Africa’s domestic network — anchored by Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth — accounts for a disproportionate share of Africa’s busiest corridors, reflecting the country’s relatively mature aviation market and dense network of competing carriers. Second, tourism-driven routes into Zanzibar, and the Nairobi–Mombasa coastal link, show how leisure travel shapes air corridors in East Africa in much the same way Cape Town does in the south. Cairo–Jeddah stands apart as the one route on the list defined mainly by cross-border labour migration and religious travel rather than tourism or domestic business flow.
IATA’s report also points to a wider aviation trend across the continent: despite Cape Town–Johannesburg’s standing as Africa’s busiest single route, no African country features among the world’s ten largest national passenger markets for 2025 — a list still dominated by the United States, China, and a mix of European and Asian nations. It is a reminder that even as African aviation recovers and grows, the continent’s busiest corridor remains modest by the standards of global air travel.
Source: IATA World Air Transport Statistics (WATS) 2025 report, released July 2026; OAG scheduled-capacity and flight-frequency data, mid-2026.