Your calls always answered within 5 rings.
Thank Nicky for organising ihe flights for us again
I can't fault how well you have handled our holiday and I would use you for future bookings.
Made holiday so easy
As always, helpful and professional, a joy of a company to deal with!
Kept me informed about changes
Special thanks to Peter for all his help.
All good thank you. Apart from Virgin leaving my luggage in Joburg - and being without it in Botswana for 5 days
Enjoyable flight. Staff were very welcoming abd friendly. Will definitely recommend to others.
The DialAFlight consultant was fantastic every step of the way. Thank you Claire
Thanks to Shelley, as ever!
As always very good service - that is why I use you to book all my flights
Marshall organised an amazing trip
A big thank you to Nicky Degun for making our holiday a great experience. Need more people like her in this world we live in.
Excellent service as always
Yet another brilliant experience booking through DialAFlight. The only thing I would say which was slightly challenging was to transfer between flights at JNB where we had to collect and then check in luggage again for the domestic leg of our journey, resulting in all our bags including child car seat not arriving with us at our final destination. It all worked out in the end and am very grateful to DialAFlight for the brilliant customer service.
Absolutely super service as always. We always know when booking with you, that everything will be fine. Thank you so much again, Jonathan, and your able assistants for everything.
From your side all went to plan. But were very disappointed with the flight from London to Nairobi. Poor food. Indifferent service. On the return the flight was delayed by 3 hrs
Nailed it again! Thank you to Dominic and his team.
Qatar was excellent. Great seats out and back. BA on final leg to LHR also very good. Good recommendation by Lloyd.
Great service - we have problems with the flight and lost baggage but that is a BA issue not DialAFlight
Stan Castle was remarkably helpful
Fantastic as always and we had an amazing time
Excellent service as usual. Many thanks to Manny and the team.
Excellent service throughout booking and then the support when the airline cancelled my flight
The time between flights into and out of Johannesburg was too tight as there was a huge queue at passport control, we had to run between terminals and only just caught our flight to Kruger. Anyone not knowing the ropes would have missed it. Thanks for arranging our online check-in
Superb customer service consistently from Donovan, and in his absence, Manny
The change in flight details was handled really well. The app was outstanding. We were very grateful to have booked through DAF!
Always good service
Very straightforward with no issues
Very helpful and good communication
A log fire is casting soft shadows across cocktail hour and I can hear the chink-chunk of my sons playing a gentlemanly game of billiards. Next door, an elegant dining room is being laid by candlelight, just for the four of us.
Later, in the library, there'll be time to dip into The Southern African Household Guide, which is like Mrs Beeton but with added emergency bush medicine.
Staying at Mantis Founders Lodge, an hour-and-a-half from Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth) on South Africa's Eastern Cape, is like being in the country house of grand but kindly relatives, not least because this was, until recently, a private home. Built in the 1940s for the godfather of South African conservation, Adrian Gardiner, it's now a seven-suite hotel with rhinos at the end of the garden.
The library was originally Mr Gardiner's office, where he created the pioneering private game reserve Shamwari (beloved of Brad Pitt and King Charles).
He doesn't live here any more but still phones at 8pm most nights to ask after his guests. Founders is about as personal as a safari gets.
Bump down a track for a few minutes and you'll find the private railway carriage in which earlier generations of Gardiners once criss-crossed southern Africa. The glorious exterior livery has been flawlessly restored while inside there's enough burnished brass and velvet drapes to keep the Dowager Countess of Grantham happy.
Before we move into the main Lodge, (it's ours for one night), with dinner by chef Lloyd and served on the deck by butler Bongiwe, Ranger Sikhumbuzo has got a fire blazing and around us and the sound of animals is turned up to the max.
Founders is how Mr Gardiner continued to build sustainable tourism after his Shamwari years - rewilding exhausted farmland, reintroducing the Big Five - rhinos, elephants, lions, leopards and buffalo - and the smaller creatures with which they cohabit: the red-billed oxpeckers that pick out their ticks, for instance, as well as dung beetles to fertilise the orange earth.
His ambitious eco-project is the antithesis of a 'Ferrari Safari' - ticking off animals at high speed. At Founders you can watch a pride of lionesses take down a warthog or a dozen orange-eyed hippos singing in their mud bath.
But you'll stop for the marigold flash of a Cape Daisy, too, the distant flap of a martial eagle's wings or to inhale the super-stink of a patrolling hyena. It's such an intimate place that only the leopards prove more elusive than the sight of other tourists.
Founders is also an outpost of Bear Grylls's empire, offering a survival masterclass for young guests. Parents are supposed to disappear but, like the nosy giraffe watching on, my husband and I, and our eldest son, 16, were far too interested in what our 12-year-old was doing.
Stuck in the South African bush?
Lash up a shelter with rope made from the bark of an acacia tree.
Later we use some of the acacia bark rope to make bracelets, with happy memories woven in.
We return to Gqeberha, a historic, sunny city that is well served by short flights from Johannesburg an hour-and-a-half away.
Here you can book-end your safari with whale and penguin watching, surfing and sailing out of the Lodge's sister hotel Mantis No 5. It's a white and blue Miami-lookalike just 100 metres from Gqeberha's Indian Ocean beach. No 5 has one of the city's best restaurants, The Jazz Room, a private cinema modelled on the one in Clarence House and 200 pieces of art, many from Mr Gardiner's collection.
But amid the city's urban cool we have only to glance at our bracelets to feel the tug of the immersive natural world of Founders - and what a privilege it has been to experience it.
First published in the Mail on Sunday - February 2024
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