I'm a bit more guarded in my expectations, Will. I agree that R980 is a good deal and I am pleased that they make it available to all comers. In fact I have booked several of these myself lately and always at very short notice i.e. the day before travelling - so it's not true you need to book well in advance, capetonian. But are these cheap fares just to woo back customers after the strike debacle? Who knows what we will experience next week or mext month?

And I'm still baffled that they show only those fares (X class). If for whatever reason you wanted another class, including J, you can't do it on flysaa.com. But if you look on the KVS tool there are loads of seats in the other fare buckets. And at their offices I got Z class on the day of travel.

And then there was my sister's experience last week: whenever she got to the "choose your seats" part the whole thing bombed. When she called they told her to please not to use that as they were having problems.

flysaa.com is just not up to standard for an airline that is making a mission out of shafting the t/a's. All they have done is effectively charge passengers a surcharge to get any sensible way of booking.

My take: SAA management is following badly misguided policies. It came back to bite them when they underestimated how hacked off their staff were before they went on strike and they are now underestimating how badly they can treat their customers before they hit back. Trouble is it takes longer for us to get the message across by voting with our feet than it did for staff.