No sooner have I returned from the big South American birding trip, I now have to think of NEXT year’s trip. The 330 day window is approaching for the outbound and I like to book as soon as I see the flights loaded. Of course we are using miles from various accounts and there has been some tweaking done because of the American and Virgin Velocity devaluations. This is why I have delayed the trip reports but hopefully I will soon have the important flights booked and can relax a bit. It has brought to mind a few things I have to avoid while planning “The Godmother of all African Adventures“.
TOP 8 THINGS TO AVOID
- Major public holidays – not only in my home country of Australia but I want to avoid holidays in the destination countries as well. It is much harder to get award flights at these times. I check this using Time and Date.
- School holidays – the last thing we need is for national parks to be crowded and booked solid. Doesn’t make for peaceful birding! In this case, I want to avoid South African school holidays while we are in Namibia and Zambia.
- Ramadan – We’ll be using Etihad and possibly Qatar Airlines for this itinerary so I want to avoid traveling during Ramadan. We like to go into the cities during layovers and have a couple days in Dubai for shopping so don’t want to deal with not being able to eat and drink at our normal times. This makes the trip a challenge as we want to avoid traveling over Easter on the Aussie end and be home well before Ramadan starts and still get reasonably good weather. Which brings us to…
- Rainy Seasons – we couldn’t avoid all of the rainy seasons because this itinerary is in vastly different parts of Africa but I kept it to a minimum as much as possible.
- Major sporting events like the Olympics, FIFA World Cup, etc. Also makes award tickets hard to get and airports will be crowded.
- Major elections – I like to avoid them as sometimes they are treated as holidays and services are not available or curtailed because everyone is watching the results come in.
- Airline miles devaluations – I try my best to book before a devaluation takes affect. I couldn’t help the AA one which happened on 22 March as our trip next year can’t begin until after Easter 2017 but I had to reverse the order of the trip to avoid the Velocity devaluation of Etihad partner awards.
- Personal and family events planned for 2017 – I had to tweak the dates to avoid being away at certain times when we need to be home.
My goal here is easily booked award tickets to go birding at an optimal time when the weather is decent, everything is open and doing business as usual and the parks won’t be crowded.