Low-cost carrier 1Time is to introduce flights between East London and Cape Town from tomorrow.

Initially the service is for the leisure industry and 1Time will fly between the cities on Fridays and Sundays, the airline's commercial manager Desmond O'Connor said.

"The interest in the route has been tremendous and surprisingly the business is equally split between East London and Cape Town."

Initially the airline thought the bulk of the passengers would be flying from East London to Cape Town for weekends away.

"The interest is such that we have already allocated our larger 150-seater planes to this week's flight and it seems we will be doing so at least for the first few weeks."

The airline launched its new service with a one-way price of R291 inclusive of all taxes.

O'Connor said the airline could not afford to use the price for all seats but the low prices were set to encourage people to book early.

"What we have done on the Cape Town route is peg about 25 percent of the seats at the R291 airfare and then raise the prices as the seats fill up at about R100 for every 10 seats sold until the peak price of R791 per seat for the last and therefore most desirable seats," O'Connor said, adding that the policy was in place to encourage people to book as early as they possibly could for flights.

Even at R791 all inclusive the fare is 44 percent cheaper than the equivalent SA Express fare of R1265 plus taxes of R150, making a total of R1415.

At this stage there are no immediate plans to increase the frequency of the East London-Cape Town flights.

"We will be watching our weekend flights and listening to passengers and as soon as we believe it would make good business sense to fly during the week we will go ahead and do so."

O'Connor said the company was very happy with the growth shown on the Johannesburg-East London route.

The leisure market and people from small businesses, who had to pay for flights themselves, were taking advantage of 1Time's low costs but larger companies seemed reluctant to commit to the carrier.

"This is the one aspect impacting on further growth of the route," he added.

The current SAA staff strike had been a huge boost for 1Time.

"People are no longer dealing with SAA in the short term and are booking flights with us direct off the website," he added.

1Time had received the second of the three 150-seat aircraft it had ordered and one of them would be used on the Johannesburg-East London route due to the success of this route.

However, if the airline was to put on more flights to make the service even more convenient it would have to grow its business market - particularly from the East London side, he said.