South Africa less than MRU?
 

Just checking fares for an AONE4 ticket I will buy in the next week or two. Both EF and OW list South Africa (same fare for JNB and CPT) as less than MRU. On the OW site, the MRU based fare is 188,000 (US$6,962.06 with currency conversion done at XE.com), while the JNB based fare is 51,990 (US$6,480.98). On EF, same thing, with fares (listed on the site in US$) of $6,836 from MRU and $6,701 from JNB. Anyone have any additional info on this?

The Rand has been tanking of late.

I was equally surprised, as I noted in the other thread I started today regarding starting a DONE5 in South Africa... its pretty impressive how much cheaper it is.

The only thing that I'm still trying to ascertain is whether there are some crazy high taxes or something local that will bump up the price in the end; I seem to recall somebody posting that certain countries hit you especially hard when you go to ticket (outside of the normal fuel surcharges, airport taxes, etc.).

AFAIK India is one of them. I don't think South Africa has anything like that but I am not sure.

Right, India and some South American countries have luxury taxes which hit DONEx and AONEx purchased there.

Tell me about it! :(

No luxury tax here. What you see is what you pay. Grab 'em while stocks lasts. (I fear an imminent price adjustment to compensate for exchange rate moves.)

Curiously, MRU is still around $280 cheaper for the AONE5 and $550 cheaper for an AONE6.

With current volatility I can't be sure what rates you used, but I suspect you have neglected to add the USD300 surcharge for MRU. In which case only the AONE6 is, marginally, cheaper ex MRU.

for reasons too complicated to go into here, on feb 22 i purchased one aone6 from ba in mru and another aone6 from cx in jnb.
the itineraries were very similar though not identical. after taxes, fuel fines, service fees etc., the bottom line (with the exchange rates from feb 22) was that the ba mru ticket ended up being just over US $700 cheaper than the one i purchased from cx in jnb.

Amazing. Even accepting that
- the comparisons are not entirely like for like
- the ZAR has since weakened by 4% against the USD (that already makes the SA fare more than USD450 cheaper now by my guesstimate of your total cost)
I would have expected a much closer result based on BA's more aggressive fuel fines and the USD 300 charge.

i too was expecting the cx ticket to be less than the ba one. but even with the egregious 300 ba mru service fee the ticket worked out cheaper in mru.

next time though, as long as the rand stays depressed i think i will purchase in jnb. as i normally head from mru to jnb (not mru-lhr), it can be a pain to time everything to synchronize your schedule with the not-every-day comair flight. plus you waste a ticket segment to get from mru to jnb which you otherwise could use elsewhere.

bottom line, even though it was around us $700 cheaper, next time i would opt for purchasing in jnb.

does anyone have any experience using the aa ticketing service in south africa? perhaps it would be cheaper than cx due to the fuel surcharges imposed by cathay?

Here is a thread with more references quoted there. The AA GSA in Cape Town seems to be quite nice and good to work with.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=799511