Ledroc757

I am thinking of booking a flight to Cape Town and was probably going to book on the South African Airways website as Air Canada does not show flights to Cape Town on their website. One option with South African is to fly Air Canada to LHR and then switch to South African.
My question is, I can book my seat selction on the South African site for their flights but not the Air Canada seats. If I book with their site will Air Canada allow me to call through their call centre to book seats for the YYZ - LHR portion of the trip?

Thanks for any advice.

rankourabu

Can you not book thru an online agent like Expedia, Travelocity, etc?

You can call AC for seat assignments, online selection is not an option (but they've been saying is coming soon for over a year now)

km101

Be careful of what booking code your seats on South African book into on AC. A fare on SA might book into a tango bucket if you are not careful

I would book on SA website, select SA seats, look for the AC booking reference number( might have to call SA and ask) then call AC and ask them what fare code you are in and ask for your favourite seats.

If you are unhappy with your fare class, you may be able to give AC more money to increase it

Unless you don't care about the aeroplane miles.

I would book directly with SA, and avoid Expedia or other travel sites. If anything goes wrong on your trip, the airline will be easier to deal with than Expedia

DaveTO

+1. Online travel agencies are only good for booking mistake fares...and then you cross your fingers that things don't go wrong.

rankourabu

Old myth. Expedia happily releases control to the airline if you so desire.
And on day of departure, airline has control anyway if there are delays, etc, you deal with the airline anyway.

If prices are same, sure, book on the airlines website, but if there is savings to be had, there is no disadvantage.

canadiancow

Unless you're booking AC, in which case seat selection becomes more difficult

jlionw

I am obviously biased, but I have no issues with OTA. Especially if fare is cheaper.

The only issue is that for Expedia, I find that they do not have the same 24hr policy. It seems that for Expedia.ca, you can cancel/modify on the same day according to the PDT time zone. (I.e. you can cancel/modify until 23:59 PDT of the day you booked). This is according to what the agent on the phone told me.

In general, I find that you can find cheaper T+ fares on Expedia.ca, especially if you book a hotel as well. In many cases, the flight + hotel total can be cheaper than the flight alone on AC. (I have booked a flight+hotel, and din't even bother staying in the hotel.)

Mind you, my experience for all this has been for NA flights, so I do not know much about overseas.

Disclaimer: Expedia employee here, but these are my opinions and not that of my employer. Of course my employer would prefer you book with them, but this post is still not from my employer. My post explains some positives for Expedia as I am more familiar with Expedia.ca and Expedia.com, but that doesn't mean any other competitors website doesn't offer the same product.

TheFerret

Slightly not answering your question but I would recommend going on KLM from yyz -> ams -> cpt, it is the most direct flight you can get from Toronto with the total travel time of 20or so hrs. If you insist on going with SAA, I personally would go through JFK, since there is a direct flight to JNB from there.

Ledroc757

Thanks to everyone for their comments. I prefer to use airline websites directly if I can over travel sites. I saw KLM has those flights but I would like to accumulate aeroplan points which I believe you can with SAA. Maybe the long flight out of New York or Washington would be better. They have better seat pitch over KLM or AC in economy anyway.

ridefar

There are lots of routes that are worth searching (disclaimer in advance: I know these go to JNB, not sure about CPT): SAA flies direct from Washington and Atlanta, also from Sao Paolo, Frankfurt, and London, all of which are reachable with AC direct.

ABG

Delta has service from Atlanta to JNB... not SAA. No one does North-America CPT....

TheFerret

I would try and avoid the flight through Washington, I did it last year and stopping in Dakar is a real pain, both for sleeping time and security checks. I will be going through JFK this year and I think it would be better.

ridefar

Ah, sorry, my mistake. I thought they offered this some time ago, but I must have been confused.

rankourabu

Funny enough, you can select AC seats on Expedia for AC flights you've booked, but you cant do that on aircanada.com...

but... its coming soon! (since early 2012)

CaptainEKAirbus

Don't forget that there's no LHR-CPT direct flight anymore on SAA. Perhaps you can either look at BA's if you still want to collect some aeroplan miles (on the AC YYZ-LHR portion) and don't want to have to worry about the hassle of connecting a second time in JNB. Or just book an alternative ie. KLM via AMS, or EK via DXB