URC boss reveals plans to ease travel burden for South African teams

Earlier this season, footage of Lions players sitting in cramped economy-class seats on their way to Europe went viral, highlighting the problems SA teams face when making the trip.

While the URC foots the bill for the European teams' travel needs, SA Rugby covers the expenses for the South African teams, and the cost in rand of securing business-class seats for an entire rugby team is prohibitive.

According to URC boss Martin Anayi, some of the plans being considered include a return to fewer but longer tours and charter flights that offer more business-class seats.

"I think travel has been well documented. It's definitely been a challenge," Anayi said.

"When we put together a travel plan, which was a business case presented to the other participants in terms of pitching the expansion of the tournament, the price of an average flight ticket was 35% less than it is today in South Africa.

"That 'natural' inflation has been quite difficult for South Africa financially. European teams' travels to Africa have been financially covered centrally, while SA Rugby take responsibility for their local franchises' travel.

"The slight gaps in that are around travel policy and such like, as well as funding, so we brought in Qatar Airways to help in that regard and it's worked to a certain degree, but there's a helluva lot more to do there."

"I believe it's going to be really important for us to lowering costs through bulk ticket acquisition, getting better routes and conducting better scheduling. We can make journeys far more palatable and we're quite conscious of that. That's really the one thing we're working very hard on," Anayi continued.

"One way we can also help - but it's going to require sign-off from SA Rugby - is to make each tour slightly longer, where you only go to Europe twice during the season instead of three or four.

"That would effectively be a better position from a cost point of view and therefore we can invest a bit more in that travel. We're looking at that. To reduce flights, one could add another match to the tour. When it™s a four-match tour, teams can settle into a location and get integrated into their hotels and environments."

Meanwhile, Anayi also said that Champions Cup qualification for URC teams will return to meritocracy. In other words, it will be decided by the top-ranked sides rather than the current qualification that rewards the geographical pool winners.

As a result of the current policy, the Sharks missed out on Champions Cup qualification this season despite finishing eighth on the log. Instead, the eighth and final spot went to Cardiff for winning the Welsh Shield despite only finishing 10th on the overall table.

Going forward, the URC is set to return to the old format where the top eight teams will qualify for the Champions Cup rather than the geographical pool winners and the next top four teams.

"It's highly likely we will revert back to a straight meritocracy," said Anayi.

"The way it works now is we take the four geographical shield winners and next four highest placed sides in the league, and we did that because we wanted a broad range of teams in the Champions Cup.

"There was quite a vocal objective to that within some of our stakeholder groups who didn't want that. They said they would go with that for a two-year period, and then we would review this summer.

"Unless it is unanimous to continue as we are, we will revert back to a straight meritocracy."