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Flights between countries in Africa


Tokyo Mom
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My husband and I will be on an Oceania cruise in January 2019, starting and ending in Cape Town. After the cruise we will be traveling to Victoria Falls (where we will spend 2 nights) and then spend 3 nights at the Ngoma Safari Lodge in order to see Chobe National Park. We will then fly out of Kansane to return to Cape Town for the flight back to the states. My question is, is there a particular airlines that anyone can recommend above another for the local flights? Thanks so much - Michelle

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Can't really recommend any particular airline but I can tell you most of them have a 15kg checked bag limit. A bit of a worry for cruisers! Some of the smaller companies also want soft sided duffle bags rather than suitcases.

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My husband and I will be on an Oceania cruise in January 2019, starting and ending in Cape Town. After the cruise we will be traveling to Victoria Falls (where we will spend 2 nights) and then spend 3 nights at the Ngoma Safari Lodge in order to see Chobe National Park. We will then fly out of Kansane to return to Cape Town for the flight back to the states. My question is, is there a particular airlines that anyone can recommend above another for the local flights?
I think you're going to be more limited by schedules than anything else, in the sense of who flies there and how often. Cape Town is not a good starting/ending point because Johannesburg is much better served by airlines.

 

First question: Do you know whether you need to fly to Victoria Falls or to Livingstone? A quick search suggests that there's a daily non-stop from Cape Town to VFA on South African Airways, and that the only non-stop alternative is Kenya Airways, which flies daily but to only one or the other. (You'd also want to check that the KQ flight is actually bookable; Wikipedia warns about traffic rights between these points but I'm seeing an online price using my usual pricing engine (ITA Software) so it may be that KQ now has traffic rights.) It almost goes without saying that both of these airlines use regional jets for these routes, if that is an issue for you.

 

If you're prepared to connect, then there are obvious options through JNB, both on SA and on British Airways; it also looks like you can connect through Windhoek but that's a less regular/frequent option. Either BA or SA is absolutely fine; I routinely use both airlines for short-hauls within South Africa.

 

Second question: Can you fly back to the US from JNB rather than CPT? If so, you will find it much easier to get back to the US from Kasane (BBK), which has non-stop flights to JNB but not to CPT; in addition, there are more long-haul flights from JNB than from CPT. So unless you are planning to spend more time in Cape Town at that end of the trip, or for some other reason you must fly home from CPT rather than JNB, then routing BBK-JNB-US would be the obvious thing to do.

 

If you have to go to CPT and therefore have to connect, then connections in JNB are the obvious suggestion - although again it looks like there may be some other more exotic and irregular options.

 

Can't really recommend any particular airline but I can tell you most of them have a 15kg checked bag limit. A bit of a worry for cruisers! Some of the smaller companies also want soft sided duffle bags rather than suitcases.
This may be true for transfer flights to/from game reserves, and you'd have to talk to your lodge about transfer arrangements. A road transfer would avoid any baggage issues.

 

But it is not true for the mainstream airline flights to/from South Africa.

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Oh my - thank you SO much for all of that information. We will be flying into Victoria Falls. My thinking for flying into/out of Cape Town is that the cruise will start/end from there. We will be flying in a few days early and do our touring of Cape Town before the cruise. I was thinking we could store our luggage, except for the two small bags we plan to take with us for VF/Chobe at the Cape Town airport. We are planning on flying BA to and from South Africa from the states - so perhaps when we make those arrangements - the other flights can be made with BA as well. To be perfectly honest I did not know that BA had routes to VF and Kasane. I truly appreciate all your help/suggestions. Michelle

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I was thinking we could store our luggage, except for the two small bags we plan to take with us for VF/Chobe at the Cape Town airport. We are planning on flying BA to and from South Africa from the states - so perhaps when we make those arrangements - the other flights can be made with BA as well. To be perfectly honest I did not know that BA had routes to VF and Kasane.
If you need to store luggage rather than take it to Victoria Falls and Chobe, then that might be a reason for flying back to CPT. If you do that, then your itinerary is US-LHR-CPT, sightseeing+cruise, store luggage, CPT-VFA, Victoria Falls/Chobe, BBK-JNB-CPT, collect luggage, then CPT-LHR-US.

 

The other alternative involves US-LHR-CPT, sightseeing+cruise, CPT-JNB, store luggage, JNB-VFA, Victoria Falls/Chobe, BBK-JNB, collect luggage, then CPT-LHR-US.

 

So in a sense it's much of a wash. I suspect that you may find the long-haul tickets are slightly cheaper if you fly back from JNB rather than CPT. However, you would need to build in a long break at JNB on the way to VFA, so as to make sure you have time to store luggage before going on to VFA even if your CPT-JNB flight is late.

 

One thing that I forgot to say is that it looks like the only flights from BBK to JNB are SA flights; BA doesn't fly there. However, BA does fly from JNB to VFA. So you would have to factor this in to your planning. But two one-way tickets may cost no more than one round-trip ticket (which would technically be an open-jaw ticket anyway), so there may be little downside to flying one way on one airline and back on the other.

 

I did have a quick look to see whether it might be likely to be cheaper overall if you were to add the regional flights to the long-haul ticket. But using published fares this didn't look likely to be the case. You may find that it's rather cheaper to buy the short-haul tickets separately. When you research this, use the airlines' own websites, setting the country to South Africa if necessary, because I think that it may be that the cheapest some fares are not available to websites based outside southern Africa. The same applies to using a travel agent based outside southern Africa: they may not be able to get the lowest fares that you can get buying directly from the airline.

 

There are, of course, some downsides to buying separate tickets if you intend to use them to make what is in effect a connection. You don't get protected on your onward flight if you misconnect, and your bags may not be checked through so you'd have to collect them at the transfer point and check in again. All of this adds time and risk. So you have to factor in these things too.

 

I don't know why you've decided to fly BA for the long-haul flights. But if it is because you are an Avios collector, then don't forget to look at award pricing for the BA short-haul flights. They can sometimes be good value compared to buying cash tickets. I do a mixture of cash tickets and Avios tickets, depending on the circumstances of each trip.

 

Finally, the last thing I thought of to mention was that you may want to know that the SA non-stop flights from CPT to VFA are operated by a subsidiary, Airlink; the same applies to the BBK-JNB flights. SA's flights from JNB to VFA are mainline, as are SA's CPT-JNB flights (some of which are operated by long-haul widebody aircraft for capacity reasons). All of BA's southern Africa short-haul flights are operated by its franchisee Comair, whose fleet is all 737s.

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Our TA booked us on BA flights from Capetown to Johannesburg and then on to Victoria Falls. The flight to Vic Falls was on a large plane and with the best service we have had. Full breakfast served on short flight.

We spent 2 nights in Vic Falls, not enough, 2 more would have been great.

If you stay in Joburg do a lot of research re where to stay, what to do and how to get around. I felt unsafe here and I have travelled to a lot of places and generally on my own. This time I was with my adult daughter, she is also well travelled and she too was not at ease.

Vic Falls is a marvellous place, the people we met who took us on tours were fantastic, very knowledgeable and also entertaining.

 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

It's good that you have time to look at all of the options, or in some cases the lack of options.

 

I would suggest really putting thought into the time you are in Africa post cruise. The flights from one place to another etc, use up a lot of time.

 

In November 2016 we were in South Africa for 13 days, and in that 13 days we had 8 flights. It was exhausting.

 

We flew from London to Johannesburg, visited Cape Town, then the wine country, then back to flew to Kruger Park for safari. Then it was fly on to Victoria Falls, then back to Cape Town and Johannesburg before flying to London. There were flights in between Johannesburg and Cape Town, flights to and from the little airport near Kruger, flight to and from Victoria Falls, flight back to Cape Town then Cape Town to Johannesburg, it was crazy.

 

This is the only time in my life that I have allowed a travel agency to do our scheduling, thinking they would know better than we did. We've traveled all over the world but for some reason I felt that since we had never been to Africa I wouldn't handle the schedule myself. The only thing I did right on that trip was book Queen Mary 2 from NYC to Southampton UK. Going back we took a 14 night Transatlantic from Southampton back to Florida. We should have had a minimum of 3 weeks in Africa with an additional safari, probably at Chobe.

 

Fortunately we will go back to Cape Town in January 2019, this time by ship, and we will be able to book some safari time again.

 

I hope you have a wonderful time, and are able to schedule your plans where you can really enjoy all of your time in Africa.

 

My apologies if my post doesn't make a lot of sense. I just don't want you to not see all of the wonders there are because the flying uses up your time.

 

Cape Town is OK for sight seeing around the CBD and beach area during daylight. Johannesburg is risky IMHO.

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Thank you for your suggestions. Pretty sure our plan is to fly out of Dallas on 12/30/18, arriving in Cape Town on 1/1/19. We'll then spend 4 nights in Cape Town before departing for our 16 day cruise. Once that ends we'll fly from Cape Town to Victoria Falls - flying through Johannesburg to store our luggage. Then it's 2 nights in Victoria Falls and then 3 nights in Chobe before flying out of Kasane back to Johannesburg and onto the states. We'll be gone a total of 28 days. It is a lot of flying but seems to be the most efficient way to see as much as possible in that time frame. Hoping to get flights booked this weekend.

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