February 10, 2007
Flights to South Africa
In April 2006, I had to fly to Johannesberg, South Africa to attend an IST Africa conference. After checking ebookers.com to see the possible routes (a helpful way of figuring out which airline sites you should search to get tickets), I saw that there was a through Aer Lingus/Virgin atlantic option that had nice connections and also was coming in at around 800 euros, which was very competitive compared to others. Knowing that Virgin Atlantic would have State of the Art IFE systems (seat back tvs even in economy), I decided to pursue this option as a priority. I exited ebookers.com and logged onto the Virgin atlantic web site directly and for some strange reason, I could get the outbound airport Dublin in the pull down menu, but it didn’t then allow you to select Johannesberg as the final destination. This seemed strange as ebookers.com indicated that the two airlines had a code sharing arrangement on this trip and a through ticket could be purchased so usually, the company’s web site will allow these selections if they allow other agencies to sell them. For the time being, during the initial investigations, I selected London Heathrow as departure point and Johannesberg as arrival point and the price was around 600 pounds sterling (around 800 euros at the time). I then called the Irish office of Virgin Atlantic, which I think routed me through to a UK call centre and spoke to a very nice lady. I explained to her that I was planning on originating the flight in Dublin and would prefer to buy the tickets as a through fare, in case anything would go wrong. I explained how I didn’t seem to be able to do this from their web site. She apologised and said that was the case and that they were revamping their web sales part of the site and this would be fixed eventually. However, she said she could get me the exact flights that I wanted as a full ticketed Virgin atlantic ticket with the Aer lingus flights combined and amazingly, the price she quoted me was 550 pounds sterling, 50 pouns less than the web price for LHR to JHB only. So somehow, not only was I getting the return Dublin - London Heathrow ticket free but even less. I told her that I would think about it and let her know. I thought about it for all of about 10 minutes, got in touch with Eimear at TSSG, passed on the details and this ladies name and direct number and asked her to immediately book the return ticket to JHB from Dublin with Virgin atlantic. All flights went extremely well on this very long journey and the connections were excellent on both legs.
Posted by jclarke at 3:19 PM
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