<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by gunnar:
I find the stories about people fedexing their credit cards to travel agents in SA a bit scary.</font>
There is just one issue I like to bring up. As you read in popular travel guides, visitors to RSA need a return ticket and may have to prove that they´ll have sufficient funds during their stay. I for myself was never questioned about this topic at JNB immigration but always at CPT immigration. One time, I was ask to present my return ticket at immigration, but I was only able to provide a nice printout of my reservation and commenting, that I will buy the ticket in RSA. Finally this (worthless) sheet of paper got an official RSA stamp and my passport another temporary residence permit.
<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by gunnar:
Doing all this via LH sounds like a much better alternative.</font>
Indeed, it is an alternative but let me add two thoughts:
1. To make a reservation is a completely different story from the buying the ticket.
2. If the agent who makes your reservation is not the issuer of this ticket, especially for RWSTAR tickets it looks like to me that this is time consuming. They check the rules, the calculate taxes and the fare. Sometimes the computer does not accept the input – or even worse: does not work – and some phone calls are involved…
Let it put me in that way: If time is involved the party who ran out of it has a slightly disadvantage (eg. you arrive at JNB at 0815 in the morning and your local connection departures is at 1000).