Filed under: >Africa,Travel Planning — Posted by: Baden on Dec 17, 2007
Under normal circumstances, with Christmas just over a week away Barb and I would be spending most of our energy with getting ready for the holidays. It’s not that those Christmas things aren’t being done but today was a particularly productive day for our travel as well. The reason is that although it’s 10 months into the future, today we booked our flights to Africa.
[continue reading "The Making of an Excellent African Adventure - Part 3" ...]
Without a doubt, this really sets
the high water mark for advance trip planning as we have never booked anything so far in advance as for this trip. The reason for us needing to make our flight reservations at this time is that we have accumulated enough British Airways points to book the entire trip on points. We have been watching the BA web site since we came back from Eastern Canada in October and have found that many of the seats that are available for points redemption book up almost 9-12 months in advance.
Although Barb has been doing research on our itinerary for our Excellent African Adventure in some fashion for almost a year, we really haven’t settled anything for our trip planning and now only have a start and an end date to work with. Very likely the bookings of the things that we will be doing on the trip will occur over the next 6 months.
Flying to the southern part of Africa will require almost 22 hours of total flying time split up with an overnight stop over in London. We had deliberately chosen our flights this way to give us a chance to recuperate before flying south from England for the second really long flight.
Fortunately, we have been able to collect enough British Airways points to be able to book all of our flights in business class. It’s been several years since our last business class flight and with this trip to Africa having extra long flights in both directions we have been collecting our points for this purpose for a long time.
Hopefully the over 6ft. of legroom and the fold flat seats will help take the edge off of having to be stuck in the air for over 20 hours.
Baden