I'm planning a trip to South Afria and will fly business on either DL or SAA. I'm quite familiar with DL's BE, but know nothing of SAA's business class product other than they have lie flat seats (I've seen the dimensions on seatguru and SAA's website). Does anyone have recent first hand experience regarding service, food and enteretainment? SAA's webiste is not informative at all and I'm not seeing any recent posts in Fodor's archives.

Thanks.

I believe they only serve South African wine.

I flew economy class with SAA a couple months ago. The service was better than United (who I connected to SAA with).

Where do you have your layover? I had mine in the Cap Verdi Islands. They don't let you off the plane so that hour and 20 minutes turns out to be a long time. Sometimes the cabin was too hot and other times the cabin was really cold, so dress accordingly. They had several channels and Video was on demand, so you could pause the movie when you got up to go to the toilet. And this was in coach.

Check out: http://www.airlinequality.com/Forum/saa.htm

Thank you for the link which contained great first hand experience regarding business on SAA.

I am unable to find flights on Delta from NYC area to Capetown or Johannesburg. Did you find flights? And the lowest fare for BC I found was $6-7000.

Are there lower BC fares to be had?

At present, I am not considering using FF points.

I can't see any published fares on SAA for less than $8000 or so at the moment (NYC/WAS<>JNB/CPT).

There used to be a United/SAA round-the-world fare available from the US that was cheaper than a straight return fare in business, but since SAA joined Star Alliance I think it's a goner; can't find the fare listed anywhere. However for about the same price as above, you can get a business-class RTW that will easily get you to SA; or if you don't mind buying a separate ticket to SA (or anywhere else in southern/eastern Africa) from Mauritius, then the joint United/Emirates RTW, available in the US for around $5500 in business, will get you to MRU easily enough. You'd have to come home via Asia or Oz; what a tragedy.

Jed - You may want to check Delta from ATL. They just started service to JNB with a stop in Dakar, Senegal this month. Aircraft utilized is a 767-300.

My trip is over a year away, so I have not searched fares as of yet. We will probably try to use DL or UA miles to secure FF business seats.

Totally off topic, but I'm excited that DL is expanding their international operations to such an extent. I hope this gives them a competitive advantage/promising future.