One of the popular holiday destinations that never seems to drop much in price when flying direct from London, even during sale periods, is Cape Town.
The main reason for this is that BA has a monopoly on the direct route London-Cape Town. As a result, they are free to literally set the prices however high they wish to.
I had a quick look this morning at the Low Fare Finder Tool on ba.com for prices through the year in Business Class to Cape Town and this is what it looked like:
That’s right, for the most part, a business class ticket costs over £3,000 per person. And it gets worse. I clicked through to book a trip during the ‘sale’ period for 10 days in November and this was the final price:
So in actual fact, you are looking at more like £3,500 per person.
Taking that into account, the following sale price from Oslo to Cape Town is superb!
I wrote last week about the fantastic £1500 business class deal to New Zealand with Qatar Airways. Although that deal has now ended, Qatar has, on the quiet, launched some more excellent sale fares from departure points such as Brussels and Oslo and without question, the standout offer is this fare to Cape Town.
OTHER PERKS
As Qatar Airways is a member of the Oneworld alliance, you can credit flights taken with them to British Airways Executive Club. A quick check using the BA Tier Point Calculator reveals that this trip would earn you 560 Tier Points and 26,990 Avios even if you are just a basic Blue member.
That would bring you most of the way to the 600 Tier Points required to earn BA Silver status*. This is a valuable perk which allows you lounge access, additional baggage allowance and the ability to choose your seat for free at the time of booking, among other benefits.
Just how good is this deal?
Well, I priced up a random 10 day trip to Cape Town in November from Oslo:
Which works out at roughly £1275 – More than £2000 cheaper than flying BA direct!
In fact, direct flights on BA in economy are over £1000 on those dates.
You can actually bring the price down roughly another £100 by choosing flights with longer connection times in Doha but I wanted to try and minimise the total time of itinerary in order to compare it with direct flights from London
How to get to Oslo
It should be cheap and easy to get yourself to Oslo. You can either utilise Reward Flight Saver and book yourself a separate Avios return ticket which starts at just 13,500 Avios and a fixed £35.
Alternatively, you can book yourself a separate cheap return on the likes of Norwegian where prices will regularly be less than £80.
How to book and get this price
You should use Qatarairways.com to search for flights.
I’ve found recently that search engines such as Google Flights will not show some of the cheaper Qatar promotional flights even though they are bookable through Qatar directly.
- You must book by 15th May.
- These low prices are available from mid-August 2017 until March 2018.
- Fares do get more expensive around the Christmas period although expect to still save around £3k on direct business class flights from London if you do end up booking over the festive season.
The other important thing to note is that I have used the promotional code MASTERCARD that I first wrote about last week, in order to bring the prices down by a further 15%.
The last date that you can travel on using this code is 10th December 2017 and you can make bookings with it up until the 21st May 2017.
This means that the cheapest flights will be found between mid-August and the 10th December 2017 so that you can combine the sale with the MasterCard promo code.
This page contains details of the MasterCard deal and has the code prepopulated in the flight search engine.
VERDICT
There are no two ways about it. This is a fabulous price in business class to Cape Town. You also get to enjoy the excellent Qatar Airways business class seat with direct aisle access rather than the BA Club World offering.
In addition, you could even space your journey out a little more and combine this deal with a free night at the Four Seasons, Shangri-La or Ritz Carlton Doha as I have written about in another article today.
Ultimately, this deal won’t work for everyone. There are people who will still prefer to fly direct and pay over £1000 to fly in economy rather than £1200 for business class. Of course, if you would ideally love to fly business class, but at an affordable price, this deal is a no-brainer – with savings of over £2,000 per person over BA!
Head over to the Qatar website to see what you can book