Apologies if this or similar questions have come up, I couldn’t see anything recent.

I have return flights booked in December from LHR to JNB, however as the UK is still on the South Africa high risk list as of yesterday, I want to start thinking of alternative options.

I understand that you can spend 10 days in a low risk country prior to traveling to South Africa, including transit through LHR, as a way around this restriction.

If a new return flight, to say Morocco, was added immediately prior to the JNB flight, arriving back to LHR the same day as flying to JNB, would this work if the ticket bookings were different, given you could effectively leave the airport for a few hours? Also, would BA currently allow you to check through bags from the return flight on first booking to the outbound JNB flight, effectively allowing you to stay airside and transfer?

I assume that there is no way to add a new booking to the original one so that it is on the same ticket reference, and that even though BA will waive change fees, changing the booking to add a return flight at the start, would require the whole thing to be repriced against current ticket prices, which have gone up, meaning it would cost more than just the addition of the new return flight?

Any advice on this greatly appreciated!