My husband and I have just finalized the flights for next year’s big vacation, and this time we’re going to South Africa!

In this post I wanted to outline our tentative itinerary, what flights we booked, and how we booked them. Some of the strategies I covered before (here and here), but in this post I want to put those strategies in the context of this trip. And with that, hopefully inform on how you can do the same thing with some planning!

1. We’re going to South Africa!
2. Our ‘rough’ itinerary
3. How we booked (planned to book?) our flights
   1. The original plan: Ethiopian Airlines business class return tickets
   2. A change in plans: Qatar Airways Qsuite business class, New York-JFK to Johannesburg JNB via Doha DOH
   3. The return flight: Ethiopian Airways business class via Addis Ababa
4. Domestic flight MPQ-JNB-PLZ with Airlink
5. Summary

We’re going to South Africa!

I’ve been fortunate enough to visit Africa twice – once with my parents for a conference of theirs in South Africa, and another time in a gap year from university, visiting Kenya. I have loved both trips, and find Africa an unforgettable place with much beauty, in the culture and the nature.

South Africa is probably the most accessible African country to foreigners, given its large and well-organized tourist industry and relative political stability, in terms of the tourist experience. You can be assured a relatively calm and safe climate for your travel.

South Africa has a lot to offer, from amazing national parks where you can do endless safaris, to beautiful mountains, valleys, beaches and towns. The Kruger National Park is the pre-eminent safari park of Africa, while Cape Town is well-known for its beauty and appeal, as well as all of the southern coast, known for the famous ‘Garden Route’: a 300 mile route that brings you along picturesque villages and towns, beautiful natural formations, beaches, and of course the South African wine country.

Our ‘rough’ itinerary

At this point we have more or less finalized our main ‘stops’ of the trip, and have booked our flights, but not so much hotels and car rental. With that said, our rough itinerary looks as follows:

1. We will fly Qatar Airways (QSuite business class) from New York-JFK via Doha DOH to Johannesburg JNB, where we will rent a car.
2. We will then drive to Kruger National Park. We will stay here 5-6 days, split between two camps to see different wildlife.
3. We then drive to Mpumalanga Airport MPU and fly to Port Elizabeth Airport PLZ (by Gqeberha) via Johannesburg JNB, on Airlink.
4. From Gqeberha we will then drive the Garden route. We will do the 300 mile journey over the course of about 3 days, ending at Oudshoorn.
5. The next day we embark on a full-day drive to Cape Town, though we plan to stop here and there along the way. Most importantly: Betty’s bay, to see a penguin colony!
6. Then, once in Cape Town, we will be there for a few more days.
7. Finally, we will fly out from Cape Town CPT back to New York-JFK via Addis Ababa ADD, in Ethiopian Airlines business class.

How we booked (planned to book?) our flights

We started planning the flight bookings for this trip in mid-2024 – yes, that is 2 years in advance. Sounds crazy, perhaps? We wanted to ensure we’d have the required amount of points by the time the schedule opened, which is when the flights become bookable. With that said, we put together an initial plan, then changed it a little bit as time went on…

The original plan: Ethiopian Airlines business class return tickets

Step 1 of strategizing is always to search on both Google Flights and my number 1 favorite award flight search engine, Seats.Aero, to get an idea of the itineraries, and what is consistently available. In this case it was Ethiopian Airlines, bookable through United for 88.000 points per person and ~$50 in taxes and fees. Consistency is important! If you’re planning this far in advance, you need to be sure that your plan is sustainable.

Step 2 is to formulate what credit cards have the ‘correct’ transfer partner to enable the booking. Spend using those cards, and see what attractive welcome bonuses are available that you’d be eligible for, to start accumulating points. In our case, the only transfer partner for United is Chase Ultimate Rewards, so we prioritized spending on our Chase cards, and we both got a new Chase card as well.

Step 3, finally, is to keep tabs on the flights and adjust the strategy as necessary. It is through this that my husband alerted me that Qatar Airways may turn out to be another sustainable option – known for its amazing QSuite business class seat!

A change in plans: Qatar Airways Qsuite business class, New York-JFK to Johannesburg JNB via Doha DOH

I previously wrote a separate post on how you should go about booking a business class award ticket with Qatar Airways, and in this post I put that into practice by telling you what I did to book our outbound flights to Johannesburg.

Booking directly with Qatar Airways gives you the best likelihood of finding availability, and for a good price: 95.000 points and about $300 in taxes and fees.

So Chase is not a transfer partner with Qatar Airways, but you can still transfer your points to Chase. How? Well, Qatar Airways Privilege Club is part of the Avios ecosystem. Avios is a miles currency that kind of works like the Euro: many European countries use this single currency, and along those line, Avios can be transferred between five airlines: British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Finnair and Qatar Airways – and you can transfer credit cards points between them! That’s what we did: we used a 20% transfer bonus from Chase Ultimate Rewards to British Airways to transfer 159.000 Ultimate Rewards points to get 198.000 Avios, which I then transferred to Qatar Airways.

I then checked on Qatar Airways’ calendar how far out I could book right now, and then I extrapolated when our intended flight should become bookable. I then started checking for seat availability every so often a month before, and then daily about a week out. As soon as I saw our intended flight with Qatar Airways, I immediately booked it.

Following this path, we booked our flights to South Africa for a mere 79.500 points and $300 taxes and fees per person, flying Qatar Airways Qsuite business class. An excellent value!

The return flight: Ethiopian Airways business class via Addis Ababa

That still left the return flight. We depart from Cape Town, for which stay I found an awesome deal at the Hyatt Regency Cape Town. However, unfortunately I was never able to find Qatar Airways business class availability, so for this I pivoted back to the original plan: Ethiopian airlines business class for 88.000 points per person.

Admittedly, Ethiopian Airlines business class is not a cutting-edge product, but I believe it can be described as ‘solid’. We will be flying on both their Boeing 787-9 and their Boeing 787-8. All 787-8 jets feature business class in 2-2-2 configuration, while half of those feature an angled business class seat, and the other half a fully flat seat (see below). The Boeing 787-9 fleet features fully flat seats throughout, and most are in 2-2-2 configuration (below), while a select few are in 1-2-1.

If you’re lucky and get to fly on the A350, which is Ethiopian’s newest plane, you have a distinct chance of flying on one of their jets in 1-2-1 configuration, featuring a product quite similar to that of United’s Polaris business class seat, see below.

But the truth is that Ethiopian is notorious for swapping aircraft so perhaps we will end up on a completely different plane entirely…

I started checking about two weeks before our intended booking date, and found that Ethiopian Airlines was not quite reliable in releasing 2 seats per itinerary. For most of them, yes – but not every itinerary. Plus, the itineraries had rather variable overall durations, from 28 to 36 hours. This seemed a bit risky overall, but there also weren’t particularly good alternatives, in terms of price and the number of stops.

When the weekend came to book, an itinerary popped up that fit the bill: while the overall duration of the itinerary was an eye-watering 36 hours (!), 11 hours of that are an overnight layover at Addis Ababa, which sound worse than it is: Ethiopian has a stop-over program , through which you can get a free night at Ethiopian Airlines’ own hotel, so we will certainly make use of that. The requirement is that your stop-over lasts between 8 and 24 hours – ours is 11 hours. We should be able to get our voucher at check-in in Cape Town.

Since I also had 23.000 points in my United MileagePlus account, so I decided to use that. I transferred 153.000 points, to get exactly 176.000 points, and immediately booked the tickets.

All said and then, we booked our return ticket for 88.000 points and $52.71 per person, flying Ethiopian Airlines business class.

Domestic flight MPQ-JNB-PLZ with Airlink

The last flight I’ll briefly comment on is our domestic flight from Mpumalanga to Port Elizabeth. There is only one operator that shows up when you search with Google Flights, which is Airlink. You may have never heard of them, but they are probably the biggest domestic airline in South Africa, and are well-regarded. They have some limited international connectivity as well, to their direct neighbors, and are not really part of an alliance except for a recent partnership with Qatar Airways, and some reciprocity with United Airlines. So we booked a one-way flight with them on an itinerary from Mpumalanga to Port Elizabeth via Johannesburg.

Airlink doesn’t have a business of ‘preferred’ cabin, so whatever fare you book, you can actually sit anywhere in the plane. The cheapest fare comes with free seat selection (surprisingly they don’t monetize this at all, you can even sit in the first row!) and a 20kg checked bag, so even at the most basic fare, this is a generous airline compared to most other global airlines, especially in the West (though that doesn’t say much). High fares will impact change fees, refundability, and priority boarding.

We booked this one-way flight for about $113 per person, at the cheapest, basic fare. If you’d like you can probably use points to book this flight through Qatar Airways, or your credit cards travel portal, but I don’t think you will maximize the value of your points this way, so I wouldn’t recommend that.

Summary

In this post I’ve given some details on our Spring 2036 vacation, which will be in South Africa!

For the flight to South Africa, we booked business class flights in Qatar Airways’ QSuites, and we did this by transferring points from Chase Ultimate rewards to British Airways (20% transfer bonus!), and then on to Qatar Airways, through which loyalty program (Privilege Club) we booked the flights the moment they became bookable for our preferred dates. We will have a safari in Kruger park, then fly to Port Elizabeth with Airlink, do the Garden Route, and end ou trip in Cape Town.

For the flight back, we pivoted back to our original plan, which was to book Ethiopian Airlines business class through United Airlines (transfer points from Chase Ultimate rewards). This is not particularly difficult, as typically availability is wide-open. But again, I’d suggest you book as early as possible to ensure you get the flights you want.