This trip has been in the pipeline now for 3 years. Whilst I was still undergoing treatment in June 2019 we went to Northumberland and did a day trip to the Farne Islands to see the puffins. We joined a trip arranged by Trai Anfield, the resident photographer we'd met at Serian Camp, Kenya in 2018, and had rather assumed we'd be on an exclusive trip. In fact we were just 4 (another client of Trai's came too) amongst several 100 others on Billy Shiels' standard All Day Birdwatching Trip and although she was with us the whole time we really could have done it on our own and saved about £500! Anyway I digress; she was also running a 7 day photographic safari to Zimanga in South Africa, a reserve which had become synonymous with some quite amazing close up night shots of animals at a floodlit waterhole. We then spoke to Michele our safari guru and asked her to arrange something else in the vicinity (ie southern hemisphere) to make the 12 hour flight worthwhile and she came up with Mashatu which is a private reserve in the south east corner of Botswana, also noted for its photography hides. Actually with hindsight I think poor Ian was in for a very boring trip (although he was going to get some tuition from Trai and have a go at taking video with one of my cameras) but he wanted us to have a special trip to celebrate a) my 60th and b) my return to full health.
So it was all planned for departure late June 2020 but then ..............................COVID happened!
Trai was happy to cancel her part of the trip and although technically Mashatu could have retained our deposit, they also kindly gave us a full refund. The flights I'd booked with BA in Premium Economy were also easily cancelled and refunded. Move on to November 2020 and, despite a horrendous global death toll, infection rates seemed well down and the outlook for 2021 was quite optimistic. Obviously the travel industry as a whole had suffered badly and airlines were keen to woo passengers back to the skies with sales and special offices. Along came one I just couldn't pass up - £998pp to Johannesburg with Virgin in their UPPER CLASS cabin - luckily Ian agreed it was too good to miss and we'd arrange a holiday around it. The only proviso was the outbound leg had to be taken before end June 2021 and so I booked for us to depart 30th, returning 14th July. There was a bit of a sour note when I tried to combine the points on our Virgin Airmile accounts as it transpired you had to pay to transfer them so we ended up not getting the full c£400 off we actually should have. But never mind, still a bargain and a guarantee that we could cancel anytime and rearrange on "a date of our convenience" up until end 2022 without any fees.
Quite soon after booking what became known as the Kent Variant of COVID reared its ugly head, shortly followed by the South African Variant and basically the whole world shut down again and for a long, long time. We held off making any firm accommodation bookings and sure enough on 28 May 2021 Virgin cancelled our outbound flight and gave us cancellation/rebooking options - I'm very pleased I took a screen shot of the actual wording.
Basically we wanted to travel on the same flight, to the same destination, on the same date but 12 months later as we felt it could well take a full year for the world to sufficiently recover from COVID and that this would comply with their conditions for "no additional cost". There followed a long and complicated dialogue with the company, both by email and phone, as apparently flight schedules only show 331 days ahead therefore the booking couldn't be made yet and so Virgin wanted us to take a voucher "to make things easier". However I firmly believed they would never offer such a good deal again and therefore a £1,996 voucher was of little use, so I refused, repeatedly, and held them to their wording which had clearly been a mistake by omitting to say that any difference in fare would need to be paid. After a month of debate I finally got confirmation, in writing, that we could rebook for 2022 as soon as the dates became available (17 August for the return flight) and that it had been agreed by a named supervisor and our booking noted. Phew, persistence pays off sometimes and thank goodness I took that screen shot.
Periodically I’d check to see the current prices being offered by Virgin for the same trip and, although it's dropped by about a third since, I was aghast to see the prices on 11 May 2022
.PNG)