owl

A little-noticed award turned out to be quite lucrative for us: 20,000 miles for travel within southern africa. SAA is partners with Delta, among others. The internal Africa flights are usually priced high. We're getting a $500 ticket for each 20000 miles.

sandi

From where-to-where are you flying in Southern Africa (SAA routes)? For $500?

dlm

I agree. I have found that most flights within SA are much less than $500 RT and, therefore, not worth the miles.

owl

Walvis Bay to JNB and JNB to Lusaka.

meg

owl

Oh, and I forgot to mention that one can include stopovers on award tickets, thereby increasing their value.

sandi

I don't know when you're flying, but I put in November dates
JNB-WVB-JNB and got 2695ZAR @ 8ZAR/USD it only comes to $336 r/t incl. taxes

and JNB-LUN-JNB at 2024ZAR which is $253 r/t.

Granted if you've got plenty of miles and want to get rid of them, go for it. I rarely give up miles unless tickets costs most than value of miles at .02/mile. So 20000 miles would be a $400 ticket.

Granted the mileage you accrue on these flites isn't much, maybe 2000 miles - but we each do what we do for whatever reason we do it.

Happy Travels.

Nicci

We flew to South Africa from Atlanta using 120,000 Delta Skymiles each, Business Class. We were allowed one free SAA stop on the way to Cape Town. This is how we flew to Windhoek. I think that a paid coach ticket on this route includes the stop over as well.

owl

Hello! We are flying AA/BA for 75,000 miles: SEA-JFK-LHR-JNB-WDH (Windhoek) then on the return LUN (Lusaka)-ORD-JNB-LHR-SEA. We are allowed a stopover in the US and in any European gateway for AA. (The last time we flew to Botswana and we stopped over in Germany for a week.)

THEN we are using 20,000 miles to fly WDH(we just switched from walvis bay)-JNB-LUN, which would cost $525 according to expedia. We could have done a layover in Cape Town on the way to Zambia from Namibia, for example, but the dates didn't work.

sandi

Message: Owl -
OK, it's WDH-JNB-LUN - one ticket for each of you at 20000 miles each.
Initially read like you were doing two separate legs at different times, but if you add the two flite quotes I got direct fr om SAA of $336 + $253, than certainly go with the miles.
Sorry for the misread.
Enjoy your holiday!