The Two-Times-Ticket Theorum

I'm in a better mood today. I woke up yesterday with a burning desire to book a flight to Cape Town to see my family. So I did just that. Most of the time I struggle to justify spending 2grand on a mere weekend trip and find that flying in on a Friday night and out again on a Sunday afternoon can sometimes be more traumatic (just when you're settling back in, you have to leave again). But this time I thought screw it, I wanna go.

So I did just that ... although the actual ticket booking process wasn't as simple as I was expecting :) Haha. So I looked at Kulula - excuse me, aren't they supposed to be our *budget* airline ?! Now fair enough, I was looking at dates that are a mere 3-4 weeks away but seriously, they're charging R1200 - R1850 per flight (yes, one way people!). Ahem. So naturally I checked Mango ... not much better. So I ended up having a look at Travelstart, which can usually be quite helpful. Travelstart could get me a return ticket on SAA for just over R1700. Whoo hoo, happy days. So I start going thru the whole process. Can you believe they now offer all these "extras" (already ticked, I might add!) like TravelAssist (which I think is for people in a wheelchair and the like ... how can this be pre-ticked for every ticket purchased?), a Cancellation Policy (if you get ill or a family member dies and you have to miss your flight), an SMS service (for R19 ?! Just how many SMSes are they sending a person, I want to know!) and my personal favourite: Airline Liquidation Policy (you know, for all those people who were caught out when Nationwide went under). Sheesh. All these pre-selected "extras" add close to R500 onto your ticket price. Needless to say I didn't want any!

And then I thought, hang-on, why not check out SAA directly? Which I did, and got the exact same flights R200 cheaper! Hello, now I'm smiling :) So let's put this all into perspective for you: SAA flights ended up costing me R600 (plus a whopping R900 on airport taxes ... that's 150% of my friggin ticket price people! Now I'd really like someone to explain airport taxes to me cause they seem exorbitant). SAA is our local carrier and serves a meal on each flight. I won't say if the meal itself is good or bad, I can't remember when last I had a meal on a flight to Cape Town! But the main reason I'm pointing this out is that I still get freebies, like a meal, on a return flight costing R1500. Kulula, our original low cost carrier (ie. no freebie meals), would cost me just over R3000 ... and that's with a Discovery Vitality discount!

Anyway, needless to say I don't think I did too badly with that. But that's not the end of the story. I head off to my email account (gmail, duh) to await my confirmation email ... and find a booking confirmation email from Travelstart. WTF? Surely you can't confirm a booking before I pay? Surely. No no, their friendly email tells me I have until the 18th to pay. Eep. I certainly do NOT want to be paying for 2 flights to Cape Town on the same weekend! Panic stations. I've never had to cancel a flight before, do they let you off the hook that easily. Varen assures me they do (especially since I hadn't yet paid), but I wasn't going to be breaqthing a sigh of relief till it was resolved. So I tried calling their hot-line (about 10 times) ... no answer. Their 8 - 5 online chat service ... offline (even tho it's like 9am!). I am freaking out here people! So I mail them. Finally (about 10 minutes later) somone comes online, available to "chat". Shoo! Thankfully she had my erroneously booked flight cancelled a few minutes later and I let out a long sigh of relief. So the good news is, I'm going to Cape Town in March for a much-deserved weekend :) Yay.

Not much else happened yesterday. I did manage to get to gym tho :) And I made a delish Vegetarian Cottage Cheese Lasagne for dinner. Which my red-meat-eating Afrikaans boyfriend gave an 8 out of 10 :) I know! It was delish tho ... but was plenty prep work. Seriously, grilling red peppers till they blister and peeling off the skin is just far too much of a hassle for me! Thanks for helping, babe, you're a * :)