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Humanitarian Trip to Madagascar
Hi Everybody,
A bit of a story, but in short: I run an educational non-profit for young women in southern Madagascar called Nofy i Androy: [URL=’http://www.nofyiandroy.org/’]http://www.nofyiandroy.org[/URL]/. We are very fortunate this year to have a young Malagasy woman who has been living in Seattle the last 8 years who will travel back to Madagascar to serve as a mentor and leader for our students, in their last year of high school.
Flight costs are significant, and as a very small NGO, we have limited funds that we can use for these types of expenses. Fortunately and unfortunately, I have quite a few miles across different Star Alliance partners (in order of how I’d prefer to use them) that I can use to purchase this ticket.
Aegean: 42,300, which I would like to use since they’re terribly unresponsive to requests and there’s no easy way to request award tickets online
SAA: 54,135 (expiring in March 2016)
Chase Sapphire: 120k
United: 17,500
SAA is currently running a promotion between the US and JNB, where you can get a RT ticket for about 33k miles. However, the taxes and fees are close to $500, almost the same as a purchased ticket that currently runs around $650 and the dates are inflexible after issue. SAA has also moved to dynamic award pricing, which means a regular RT ticket can be upwards of 100k between North America and southern Africa, and over 400k one way, according to the Voyager agent I spoke to yesterday. Complicating matters is the fact that SAA Airlink, which flies between JNB and TNR, is technically separate from SAA, requiring a separate award ticket, and a flight cost of around $600 and over 50k miles RT for an award.
The dates for this travel are anytime after November 17th, 2015, returning in September of 2016. Obviously the dates are flexible, and I would like to route her through WAS for a few days on the way to TNR. I don’t know of any other *A possibilities for flights to TNR, since Air France is the main European carrier, and Air Madagascar (which has flights from China and BKK) isn’t a member of any alliance (obviously)
So, after that long story, does anybody have some suggestions on how to approach this? If I do have to end up spending money on this ticket, I would prefer to keep the total cost under $500, since that is the equivalent of three months operating costs for us.
Feel free to contact me directly at [email][email protected][/email] if you’re interested in helping, or are interested in finding out more about our NGO in general.
Thanks,
Nick
Miles to the Wild did a recent post on miles options to Madagascar… you might find some useful information: [URL]http://www.milestothewild.com/getting-to-madagascar-with-airline-miles/[/URL]
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