What 3982 DialAFlight clients thought of Africa

The guy who helped us, was amazing.

Over the years we have had excellent service from Oliver and the team at DialAFlight. Cannot recommend them highly enough.

Great service thanks. We'll be booking again

Leah and Aidan. Thank you for the amazing service and for professional touch. Much appreciated

Thank you for being brilliant

A little more help with the VeriFLY app would be great

Oli and your team, you are doing a good job. Keep it up. I have told my friends you are the best for travel

Quick action when flights were cancelled.

Everything was excellent - I will strongly recommend

DialAFlight customer service exceeded expectations. I will definitely book with you again and recommend to others

Danny was incredibly helpful. Thanks so much for the communication and rescheduling. Flights painless

Sarah is an absolute star and so proactive and helpful with all my flight plans that have been complicated over the last year. There is also always someone available to help if she is not around. Great service, thank you

Shelley and colleagues always pro-active when COVID threatened to derail holiday. Fortunately all worked out well in the end!

You played your part very, very well and will definitely recommend friends to you

Awesome service

Matthew and his team kept me updated throughout a particularly challenging journey. It took 8 amendments to my flight due to BA cancellations.

In times of Covid you guys have been excellent. Thank you.

I having been using DialAFlight for 18 years and have never been able to fault. Always offer above and beyond service and go out of their way. Connie was exceptional during Covid. Highly, highly recommend.

I always revert back to DialAflight because you give me a wide range of options.

Great communication and update

The team were professional and extremely helpful, especially when the airline cancelled our flights whilst we were abroad. Thanks especially to Harrison and Graham.

Guy and Ross are my gurus and are absolutely lovely. They have worked hard trying to sort out flights and travel requirements and been with me all the way.

DialAFlight brilliant as usual. Pity about shambolic BA customer services

From the moment that I phoned Callum pre covid to book flights to visit family until now the service has been simply outstanding. The disruption that we had with two trips that had to be cancelled due to restrictions Callum always kept us informed about our options and he went the extra mile to help us. Our flights got cancelled 4 days before. Callum managed to find us new flights and made our trip to visit family for first time in 6 years possible. I can’t praise and thank you enough.

Excellent customer service taking our needs into consideration and providing advice and guidance along the way including a designated contact. As always, well done and we are very happy customers who will continue using the services of DialAflight. Thank you Bradley and team.

It makes travelling so much easier booking with DialAFlight and I appreciate them keeping us up to date.

Neil was superb throughout. I’ve left positive reviews everywhere.

Many thanks to Darryl and team for getting us back as quickly as possible under the trying circumstances. The paperwork and bureaucracy that has to be followed to the letter is anything but fun. That's why I wish to thank DialAFlight for keeping in touch with me, for answering my many questions and for their willingness to solve whatever problem arose. I was very impressed and grateful for their help and support.

Impressed that handover from one person to another was very smooth

I was so impressed when I got a message advising where we had visited had been added to the red list. They were very helpful and were available 24/7. You have gained a happy customer. Your customer service is the best..

Spectacular scenery

Great escape to the Cape

The city's buzzing like never before – even the penguins have a spring in their step, says Mark Palmer

When the French astronomer Abbe Louis de la Caille made it to the top of Table Mountain in 1750, he observed no fewer than 10,000 stars and was so impressed that he named a whole constellation (Mons Mensae) after this iconic slab of stone.

Today, you're likely to see almost as many tourists coming and going on the cable car or huffing and puffing on foot. But that's no excuse not to join them – because once you get there the crowds become insignificant in such an exhilarating setting.

Cable car to the top of Table Mountain

We had allocated 45 minutes to wander about on the massive plateau, but it soon became almost two hours – and still, like Moses, we were reluctant to come down from the mountain.

There's so much to do up there. You can hike, picnic, study the rock rabbits (hyraxes), admire the spiky plants that thrive with little in the way of soil, practise yoga, grow tipsy on the champagne air and even abseil down it if you dare. And, of course, you can survey the scene from every angle: oceans to the left, oceans to the right, beaches down below, cloudless skies up above, Cape Point somewhere in the distance.

I was last here 21 years ago, a few months before the first democratic elections were held – and the transformation is astonishing.

The waterfront, buzzing with shops and restaurants, is a little too California for me, but it's one of the city's great success stories. By comparison, the town centre is still sleepy during the day and has largely avoided a full chi-chi makeover. When our guide said we were off to the bus terminal not far from the impressive old City Hall building, it was a case of following on trust.

After dark, head to lively Long Street, home to the Mother City's party scene

Our reward was an introduction to a chef called David, one of several who run kitchens housed in cramped wooden shacks. Lunch here is ten times cheaper than on the waterfront and, somehow, ten times more atmospheric.

But perhaps our best meal was at trendy Test Kitchen, presided over by Luke Dale-Roberts, probably South Africa's most celebrated chef. We stayed 30 minutes out of town for our first two nights, at Steenberg Farm in Constantia, the oldest vineyard (1682).

The whole place – its lush golf course, excellent bistro (wine tastings aplenty), intimate spa, manor house and colonial-style rooms – exudes charm and calm. Cape Town is a bubble compared with the rest of the country – and locals of every creed and colour seem to know that.

I detected no smugness, no sense of entitlement. Rather, an acute awareness that this is a work in progress. And just as the physical backdrop plays such a huge part here, so too does the political backdrop.

I couldn’t find anyone with a good word to say about President Jacob Zuma. Some think he could be gone within 12 months, despite his term officially having almost four more years to run.

Visiting a country that remains on a political knife-edge is exhilarating – and I was very much struck by how Nelson Mandela still has such a powerful influence; always will. His presence is everywhere: on street names, on billboards and, crucially, within the hearts of all South Africans.

Bright future: The colourful Bo Kaap district is worth a visit

We made the pilgrimage to Robben Island, where he spent 18 of his 27 years in captivity, joining a tour led by a fellow former inmate. It could be so much more interesting than it is, but if you've never done it, you must.

Visiting the penguins at Boulders Beach in Simon's Town is a good idea, too. Then head back to the city via the False Bay villages of Kalk Bay (lunch at Harbour House was sensational and we loved the ramshackle shops), St James and Muizenburg, the latter described as the St Tropez of Cape Town, which may or may not be a compliment.

Fascinating nature: Watch the penguins interacting on Boulders Beach

The swimming is colder on the west side of the Cape, but the views better. We stayed at the fabulous Cape View Clifton, which opened two years ago and has only seven rooms, all facing the ocean, all whites and greys, with soulful art and comforts of every kind.

It's a glorious spot high above the beach, with Camps Bay round the corner. A beach house that feels more like a home than hotel. You help yourself to drinks and jot it down; guests wander about in the kitchen chatting to the cheerful staff; no one wears shoes.
The sunset on our last night was the colour of the rosé swishing about in our huge wine glasses. We drank deeply on both counts, painfully aware that the morning would bring a hangover made worse by the thought of flying home.

Why our customers love us

Amazingly, it is simple old-fashioned service that sets us apart from other travel firms. And yes, we really do answer the phone within 5 seconds!

Check out the reviews on Trustpilot and the word ‘service’ appears again and again. And you’ll find many reviews from customers saying they wasted hours trying to plan a holiday themselves before calling us - often on the advice of a friend - only to find we could offer numerous options not available online, which also saved them money.

Our team of 300 travel managers has been arranging tailor-made holidays for over 40 years and we believe no one does it better. Judge for yourself.

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For more travel inspiration, read what these travel writers have to say...

The Cape escape

The clock was ticking the moment Diana Appleyard's jet touched down - how much could she see in just three days?