Getting to South Africa and Zulu Nyala

You now have to decide which airline you will fly to get to your destination.  I use Kayak.com frequently as I find them to have the best comparison pricing.  I will individually visit each airline's website that I am considering .  They best days to check for flights are Tuesday and Wednesday as these are the times airlines will post sales.  Airline schedules are posted approximately 330 days prior to departure and seats cannot be booked prior to the posted schedule.  In the months that I searched for flights I didn't really see much of a change in price.  There are several options depending on where your flying from.  Some major hubs offer direct flights such as JFK out of New York and ATL out of Atlanta GA.  These flights will take 17 and 15 hours respectively.  There are many options for connecting flights through France, Amsterdam, Egypt, London and so on.  Many offer layover in excess of 12 hours giving you ample time to visit the city you've landed in.

We chose to fly from JFK through Paris on Air France.  Our dilemma was how were we going to get to JFK from Northern CT.  We considered driving and leaving our vehicle at the airport, renting a car one way and then renting a car upon return or taking a shuttle down to the airport.   Well we found the shuttle service time line would have gotten us to New York about 9 hours early so that was not an option.  Renting a car one way was approximately $ 125 to NY and $150 back.  Not an option.  Parking our car at a cost of $33 a day for 10 days was also a no.   What I then did was to check on line for flights out of BDL To JFK and happened to find flights that were perfect for us and I was able to use my Delta sky miles to pay for most of it.   It worked out perfectly.   We arrived in NYC and had a 4 hour layover.  We had a wonderful dinner at Don Pepe's and were back at the Air France terminal in plenty of time for our flight.

You will really want to consider upgrading to either a Premier or Business Class if the airline offers one.  Most transatlantic flights fly at night and will take a minimum of 7 hours flying time to your first layover.  Our second flight from Paris was over 11 hours.  We  choose to fly Premier Voyager although the additional cost over coach was approximately $1200 additional per person.  This was definitely worth it.  And lucky for us they actually over booked the Premier Voyager section from Paris to Johannesburg and for an additional $200 per person we were able to upgrade to Business Class on the second leg of our journey.   With these class of flights we were also welcomed into Air France's airport lounges.   This enabled us to shower, change clothes and grab a quick snack prior to our next flights.