Egypt 🇪🇬

It was finally here. The day we began the trip that we had been planning for the last 11 months. I had booked United award tickets for us from Mumbai to Cape Town via Cairo and Addis Ababa. We left Pune the previous evening for our first flight to Cairo MS 969 departing from Mumbai at 2:20 AM. The flight itself was uneventful and we reached Cairo early in the morning. The plan was to spend the day in Cairo in transit and then continue to South Africa. Since we were travelling on an award ticket, I wasn’t sure if we could get the complimentary transit stamp and hotel. So we had applied for the transit visa in advance just in case. We were redirected to multiple lines and immigration counters only to be told that we couldn’t exit the airport with a transit visa. Exasperated, we finally went to the EgyptAir desk for transfer customers and they arranged for us to get the transit stamp to enter Egypt and also gave us complimentary hotel accommodation for the day. Had we followed this path from the beginning we would have been better off. But we wasted money on the transit visa and also three precious hours trying to get through. ...

Both of us had been collecting miles on United MileagePlus from quite some time. With the miles we had collected so far, I was scouting for destinations which we wanted to visit and where we could maximize our miles. Africa was on top of our list and I was trying to figure out how we could do the most with that. We had enough miles between the two of us for 3 one-way tickets from India (Central Asia region) to South Africa (Africa region) which would mean that we would need to purchase 1 one-way for one of us. ...