After 18 months of COVID and no long haul travel, towards the autumn of 2021 things started to look a lot more promising for the whole world. Despite many of the richer nations stockpiling their reserves of vaccine, Eastern and Southern Africa (South Africa excluded) appear to have got off relatively lightly in terms of cases and deaths - certainly when compared to the UK and USA.
Although we have our rescheduled Virgin flights to Johannesburg for summer 2022 and what should be an amazing holiday to Botswana, we (Ian too this time) are desperate to go somewhere "foreign" again and so the minute Kenya came off the Red List we contacted our travel guru Michele at Safari Consultants.
I prefer to book the flights myself as I can often get discounted fares by shopping around and also this time we have a lot of Avios points which we can hopefully make use of, but the question is always which to book first - flight or camps. We gave Michele some suggested dates based on flight upgrade availability but there wasn't space at the last camp so we needed to bring the holiday forward a few days and as I was working in the vaccination clinic all day I couldn't spend too much time trying for upgraded flights so I just reserved Premium Economy flights at a reasonable price for 72 hours for £20. Later that day I looked again and sure enough we could use our Avios for an upgrade on the overnight home leg but there was no availability for the outbound leg and besides we didn't quite have enough Avios. As Ian is still Gold (don't get me started!) we still have priority check-in and lounge access at Heathrow anyway.
So that's it - all set - or so we thought!
The new variant of Omicron hit the UK mid-November and gradually more and more travel restrictions were brought into place. Day2 tests which had been downgraded to LFTs were put back to PCRs and whilst we were on Fuerteventura with Sue and David in early December pre-flight LFTs were reintroduced, although luckily we arrived home just 4 hours before this came into force.
Then potential disaster struck - BA emailed to say our return flight was cancelled and then immediately emailed again to say we'd been rebooked on another, this happened 3 times and in the end we didn't really know what on earth was going on, although it looked as though the flight had simply been retimed by 15 mins. We were told to go online and accept the changes but all we could see was the outbound flight which was flying as scheduled and we were loathe to continue should we inadvertently agree to something we didn't want. 3 stressful hours and 4 frustrating phone calls to BA later and it was sorted; the new flight time was 00:10 on the next day and therefore needed to be treated as a cancellation but the first two calls went to South African call centres who either couldn't understand or help or cut us off whilst trying to connect us to a UK centre. The 3rd call did go to UK and although the girl we spoke to desperately tried to help she told us we needed to speak to the Manchester call centre as it was a part Avios booking. Eventually we got through and a charming, helpful chap sorted us out within a few minutes. I then asked if there was any chance of an upgrade on the outbound flight as hopefully, following our trip to Lake Como, we now had enough Avios and yes, sure enough, for another £200 and 60,000 Avios there was. Result!
After the New Year break we spoke to Michele about in-camp LFT testing and apparently she'd already kindly booked us PCRs to be done in the Mara at the bargain price of US$150 each saying that was the best option as she'd heard of people having trouble with only an LFT. Then one of her colleagues said he and his family had come back recently with self uploaded results/confirmation without problem so we convinced her that was the way we wanted to go.
Then finally, a bit of good fortune; with 10 days to go the UK Government has suspended the need for pre-departure LFTs and downgraded Day2 tests to LFTs again!