South African Airways – uh oh

It occurred to me earlier today at work that a few weeks ago I borrowed the January copy of Airline Business from work, stashed it into my laptop bag, and never read it. (ooops.)

So tonight I took it out of my bag and read through it. Midway through the interview with the new CEO of South African Airways I came across the following passage:

In IT, SAA is behind other Star [Alliance] carriers. While SAA has completed a painful transition to the Apollo reservations system, it still takes SAA staff several minutes longer than most of their Star counterparts to check in the average passenger. It does not have the technology to read frequent flyer cards or ascertain if a passenger has loyalty status on Star, which gives customers free lounge access and a larger baggage allowance.

And to think on my upcoming trip to Africa I’ve got CPT-xJNB-xNBO-JRO on three different itineraries. Yup. THREE different flights I’ve put together. CPT-JNB is the return portion of a JNB-CPT round-trip ticket while JNB-NBO is the continuation of my original award flight from Sydney to Africa. At least they’re both on SA. The final segment is on a completely different airline, Precision Air (PW), going from Nairobi to Kilimanjaro.

And then there’s another question that’s been bugging me since I booked all my flights … Does SA have an interline agreement with PW?