corporate-wage-slave

Welcome to Flyertalk and welcome to the BA forum. I would encourage you to participate more, there again it seems you may have a bit of time of your hands coming up. Feel free to drop in for a chat/moan/update.

I'm sorry to see that your plans came awry here despite your best efforts. I guess you decided to ride it out rather than go to some other third country location to ride out the 10 days, there again the options for doing that are somewhat narrowing right now. Hope it goes well for you, If it's the Edwardian then it's not such a bad place to stay, bottles and all.

krispy84

The point of the ban in ZA - U.K. flights is to slow the spread of the omicron variant. Getting many people home to beat the deadline is utterly opposed to that.

Making things easier or less complicated for those currently in ZA has been, quite correctly, an irrelevance in current planning.

Globaliser

A welcome to FT from me, too, and a thank you - this snippet is very valuable and welcome news for me, and it's great to have read it in your first post!

Globaliser

I'd already pointed out that the deadline was 1200Z on Friday, not 0400Z on Sunday.

But let's assume for the moment that the deadline is 0400Z on Sunday. How long do you think that would that have given BA to arrange extra long-haul aircraft and crew to fly out from the UK to ZA to operate these additional flights, how do you think the inbound flights (the rescue element) would have been crewed, and by what time would the aircraft have had to be back at LHR? It wouldn't have been totally impossible, but a moment's thought about these three things would strongly suggest that it wouldn't have been easy - even leaving aside the policy element that did find its way into the near-immediate flight ban.

Whenever someone starts criticism with the word "Surely ...", there's a good chance that it's Abermankönntedocheinfach syndrome and the criticism hasn't been thought through.

cauchy

Are the Irish authorities really refusing entry to UK passport holders in this situation? They don’t have hotel jail in Ireland, the legislation has been revoked.

Bear96

Exactly, avoiding or "beating" quarantine is not a good thing from a public health perspective.

Java Cool Dude

Cancelled my BA flight and got a full refund. My wife and I are gutted because we have always wanted to visit SA and God knows when will that happen now.

krispy84

South Africa will still be there next year, and the year after. Think of it as extra planning time and you’ll have a fabulous experience when you do go.

KARFA

I think the concern is we are going to go through this "concerning variant" cycle several times for a few years yet - so it may well be a few years. You can understand the frustration when we have been at this for 2 years already.

eugegall

Exactly. I had considered the logistics and saw that it was possible to get people home, as they were rushing to do last year when countries were going from Amber to Red or green to Amber. Granted this has different complexities being 12 hours away. My issue wasn't understanding the travel ban.

Not being thought through and not understanding something is totally different. You not considering that I lacked understanding and assuming I hasn't thought about it I guess is also "Abermankönntedocheinfach syndrome and the criticism hasn't been thought through"

We could both learn from this.

In any event. I am devastated for the tourism Industry in South Africa. I was very lucky to get there last month for safari and a nice week in Cape Town. They are doing ok but desperate for a good summer season, which isn't look great anymore.

kingcole974

Concluding my experience from my 4 day city Break to Cape Town for which we arrived on Wednesday with Qatar. We are now booked on BA42 on Wednesday morning. The moment I learned the news (not until Thursday morning due to the fab red wines) just about all options to get back to the UK before 0400 Sunday were depleted. So I then turned my efforts to getting passage to a third country to serve 10 days to avoid the quarantine hotel on my return. QR pulling out of SA killed this. We then looked at the few 'challenging' countries in Africa that still had direct flights to SA and were not on the red list. There were some but most now need some form of E Visa, which is not always instant. It looked like Uganda was the best option even though it would be 3 days before we could get there, due to the visa, but this fell down as we didn't have yellow fever vaccinations. The last man standing in Africa looked like Angola, but of course this got added yesterday.

Just had my PCR to hopefully allow me on BA42 next week. After quarantine, extra accommodation (just moved from Cape Grace to a modest apartment) we will have spent treble the budget for this trip and been away from our kids and dog for 20 days instead of 5.

I've travelled loads during Covid, I've always had a plan B and C and kept uber up to date with developments but this time my guard was down and I've been bitten.

Kudos to BA for enabling me to book a seat (first time at the back of the bus in years) for just £300. They could have honestly taken 10 times that off me to get home. Especially as they didn't fly me out.

Clearly, this is a bad set of circumstances but also feeling it hard for SA who needed a good summer and that looks screwed.

Globaliser

On previous occasions, it was short-haul IIRC. So it's exactly the "different complexities" that would have made this practically impossible, even the deadline had been as you wrongly thought. I'm not an expert or an insider, but my guess is that of all the many problems in the way of rescue flights working to an 0400Z Sunday deadline, crewing the inbound flights might have been the biggest issue. BA doesn't keep a large pool of standby crew on hand in ZA.

Globaliser

No, there really was nothing you could have done about this, other than not travel (or be able to charter a private jet at a moment's notice). It's just one of the continuing Covid-related risks of going anywhere. I thought around every reasonable possibility and I still have a family member (temporarily) stranded in ZA at the moment - but it looks like BA is sorting things out so that flights will restart quickly.

rc4566

My parents are due to fly CPT-LHR BA42 on 1st December which they now won't be doing because of the hotel quarantine. I just called the gold line and was told as the flight isn't cancelled I can only get a voucher - Is it not possible to get a refund in these situations?

mikeyfly

No, if the flight is operating and they choose not to travel, it’s voucher or nothing