South African Airways Avis 98

Review SAA airline to Mauritius from Johannesburg and back.
Wednesday 19.7.23/ Wednesday 26.7.23.
Flight 190/191 airbus 320-200
Pumsa Air Hostess is very friendly and helpful.
The plane was clean and comfortable.
The food was delicious.
We were catered for halaal.
Centrally mounted TV units for all passengers to view from the same screen.
Spacious leg seating.
Movie we watched was called 'chaos walking'

I did not book SAA, I booked Mauritius Airlines and they use SAA to do the flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg. We had our flight which was supposed to leave at around 8:45 am and the hopeless SAA changed the flight to 6am!!! This threw off our entire day and extended our wait in Johannesburg. We were hopelessly exhausted by the time we reached Mauritius! SAA is a waste of tax payers money💯👌!!!

I have requested a refund of an EMD voucher by email on 15 March 2023 to the SAA online Refunds Department.
I am still waiting for my money!!!

SAA SERVICE COMMITMENT (I quote from SAA website):
We will provide prompt refunds for eligible tickets once we receive your request accompanied by all required documentation. If your ticket is eligible for a refund as per the rules of the fare you have purchased, we will refund the appropriate amount to you according to the original form of payment. Refunds for tickets purchased directly with SAA will be processed within 21 business days on receipt of your complete refund submission.

This is more than a JOKE!

I have written letters:
- to the refunds department ... not able to process the refund.
- to the customer service ... not able to process the refund.
- to the CEO .. no answer and no response.

16 weeks of begging for what rightfully belongs to me to be returned.

SAA has a terrible attitude towards clients and very poor quality of service.
The staff members are totally unprofessional, incompetent and unreliable.

Does SAA not wonder what advertising damage they are perpetrating with their conduct?

Had a wonderful, fun flight in the economy class. Served by Gomotso and Jayson. Those guys are the best man! The service was impressive and they were very attentive. Definitely luxury in the air. Keep up the quality of service

I flew from Cairo with a transit in JHB before arriving in CPT
My bags were easily admitted in Cairo as they were 26kg and 12kg respectively... the sum of both was 8 kilos less than the permitted 46 kilos of weight that SAA allows. Yet in JHB the check-in enforcer insisted that i must transfer 3 kilos from the heavier bag to the lighter one. This, I had to do with a long queue behind me, in full view of everyone in sight, going through my underwear and carefully wrapped/packed items that were now disheveled in order to placate the gods of south african airlines and their arbitrary baggage rules of weight distribution. This kind of unyielding strictness is incredibly unreasonable and poor for maintaining any loyalty you might want to foster in your customers. I know business class gets 32kg x2 for every customer - so please don't tell me this was to save the employees' backs. By the time I was finally checked in, I was hot, sweaty and very angry with SAA. The noose gets tighter every year. Please consider reasonable allowances for your customers...

If I could give zero stars to this shoddy airline I would. I am still waiting for a refund for flights from July 2021 but booked in 2020. They were cancelled by SAA and still no refund. They were back in business from September 2021 but when you email them you just can a standard customer reply. I can see from TripAdvisor that many other people have been ripped off by this airline.
Don't fly with them!!!

Honestly, this is one of the worst airline companies ever. I am so disappointed. My friend and I bought 2 flight tickets in January 2020 from Uk to SA, and we were not able to travel due to COVID, and we are trying to contact them in order to get a refund.
In the beginning, they only wanted to refund just one of the tickets and then they decided to reschedule the flights many times. I understand this situation that COVID has brought us, but we are currently in a position where we don´t know what is going to happen with the tickets as nobody is answering the phone or replying to the emails. I am so gutted.

It took us a few months to get our money back, but this is the case with all travel companies at the moment who must be having awful cash flow issues, which some people don’t understand.
Our internal flight actually went ahead but as we couldn’t get to the country from the UK and the flight times had changed we were entitled to a refund.
We dealt with a fantastic lady named Barbara who communicated with us regularly and chased up our refund with the correct department and regularly checked in to ensure we had received confirmation and eventually our refund.
Barbara is an asset to the company and thank you for your excellent communication in the past few weeks.

The flight is not operating, and yet with only 2 weeks to go, SAA have sent me no communication to say that it is, or is not, operating. Their call centres are shut, and via social media and email, I have been told that no refund is available. This is not legal, as the service provided has not been delivered.

COVID19 is causing mayhem for everyone and everything, yet the response from SAA is the worst that I have experienced by a mile.

Book with someone else, or risk losing your money.

Disgraceful that they won't offer refunds on flights that they cancelled. Other airlines have been offering a refund service yet they do not. Asked them for assistance as I had a travel agency who were on charging me fees for requesting a refund from a flight that SAA cancelled and they just brushed me off. Will never make another booking via this carrier.

Worst Flag carrier!
Not the kind of service i expect to a flag carrier airline.. Im passenger for flight SA 222 Johannesburg-Sao Paolo March 27,2020. We found out from SAA office here in Manila that they will no longer fly to Sao Paolo and because of that we will be transferred fo Ethiopian Airways which is not our preferred airline and not worth of what we paid for. We do not wish to continue this trip due to changes of airline and we are hoping for a full refund. Tripair is not informing us of the changes until now. We would like to request to cancel it on your end because our flight is soon and it is very uncertain now because the travel agency is not responding. We have also flight in Saudia Airlines and we booked them thru Online travel agency as well. But Saudia contacted us directly about their changes and they cancelled our flight in their end. I was hoping that SAA will do the same service but I am really disappointed that SAA is not reaching out passengers to inform us the status of the flight when changes have been made since February. SAA is very unhelpful! the problem is they cancelled their flights in selected destinations including Sao Paolo but they do not notified passengers personally or at least help their passengers to cancel the booking. They just rely to travel agencies which are now unreachable! Tripair is not responding to calls or emails! and SAA Is unhelpful!

SAA ha annullato il mio volo, acquistato due settimane prima. Considerando che si trattava di un volo multi-tratta (6 voli), avevo prenotato tutti i posti, ma quando hanno cancellato due di questi, hanno anche cancellato tutti i posti prenotati sui voli operati da loro (4 voli). Ho chiesto di prenotare nuovamente i posti gratuitamente sui loro 4 voli perché li ho già pagati. Ho contattato la loro assistenza clienti su Twitter e un operatore è stato sorprendente disponibile e mi ha scritto che aveva prenotato nuovamente tutti i posti sui 4 voli SAA (ovviamente ho disponibile tutta la trascrizione della conversazione). Dopo 3 giorni i posti non sembravano ancora prenotati nella mia prenotazione sul loro sito ed ho provato di nuovo a ricevere una risposta da loro su Twitter, purtroppo senza successo. Sono davvero deluso perché la mia aspettativa, considerando che hanno annullato i miei voli, è quella che avessero più attenzione verso il cliente per una semplice richiesta come quella di prenotare un posto che peraltro avevo già pagato.
Purtroppo solo dopo la prenotazione, a causa di questi disagi, ho appreso della difficoltà finanziaria della compagnia area, ma credo che se questa è la loro linea di comportamento con i clienti, ne perderanno ulteriormente e non potranno che peggiorare la loro situazione.

I wasn’t going to waste any more of my time with South African Airways, but this issue is so pathetic that I had to post it. I know that SAA management do not bother to read these posts.

On 13 June 2018, I sent SAA an email because Voyager miles had not been credited to my account and I had no joy having them credited via Voyager’s “claim for missing miles”.

Many emails went back and forth. Mainly from Voyager Service Recovery apologising “for the delayed response to” my query.

Today, over 19 months later, I got another email from Lovey Mabaso at Voyager Service Recovery informing me that the missing miles have been loaded to my account.

Does South African Airways seriously believe that 19 months is an acceptable period to correct an oversight?

Flying from Johannesburg to London Heathrow, we had requested a gluten-free dinner for my wife. When this was served, we noticed that the biscuits to accompany the cheese were labelled 'Wholewheat.' Checking the ingredients confirmed that the main ingredient was, in fact, wheat. This could have had very serious consequences. We summoned the flight attendant; she shouted down the length of the plane to a more senior colleague, 'A woman here is making a complaint.' The senior colleague marched up, snatched the biscuits and the wrapper, and walked off without a word of apology (or replacement).

On returning home, we wrote to South African Airways UK office. As we had received no reply nearly four weeks later, I again wrote to South African Airways UK office. I received a reply from their 'Customer Care Executive' saying that their catering manager in Johannesburg was in the process of contacting their caterers, Skychefs, and would contact me again when they had had a response. Five weeks later, we have heard nothing.

If this had involved a nut allergy, there could have been a fatality. Mistakes do happen, but apart from serving food that was potentially dangerous, South African Airways failed on several counts:

1) the behaviour of the flight attendant shouting something that was
untrue down the plane was totally unacceptable
2) the more senior flight attendant rudely snatching the offending
food without apology was even more unacceptable
3) failure to answer our complaint after nine weeks demonstrates a
total failure of their Customer Care Department in not
addressing a very serious error on their part.

I hope that management see this review and deign to reply in a timely and adequate manner.

All flights canx and had to spend 60min on an international call to rebook. Traveling with an infant and SAA said we had to find our own hotel in victoria falls due to no flights. Spent $700 for one night and missed one day in jnb due to canx.
Book but dont expect any help when things go wrong

These guys planes are straight out he 1950's. Unfortunately you pay the same as the likes of Emirates Qatar etc. for a much inferior service. One benifit is their staff are good!

Not as good as it used to be but still better than most.