For as long as I've been knee deep in the world of all things cheap travel, I still never really thought I'd make it out on a safari. Three months later, I still can't believe I actually did.
Going on a safari in Africa is typically an expensive endeavor: You can typically start with five digits (yes, $10,000) and easily go up from there. By leaning on some creative (and well-timed) points redemptions, credit card benefits, and just general cheap travel know-how, my wife and I pulled it off earlier this for less than $1,500 out of pocket – not counting meals.
Spoiler alert: It did take a ton of points and a few detours to make this trip a reality. But I'd blow all those points again in a heartbeat for what was not only one of my favorite end-to-end points redemptions yet, but one of our favorite trips of all time.
Here's how we did it.
Getting to South Africa … via Istanbul
Look, I get it. I can feel you're judging me. It's palpable.
Does it really make sense to get to South Africa … via Istanbul (IST) … oh, and then Doha (DOH), too? It added another 2,000 miles and a dozen or more extra hours in the air.
No, not really. But when the universe tells you it's time to return to one of your favorite cities in the world, you listen to the universe.
In this case, “the universe” was a massive devaluation from Turkish Airlines' (stupidly named) Miles & Smiles program in early 2024, which raised rates to book Turkish Airlines business class between the U.S. and Istanbul from 45,000 miles each way to 65,000 miles apiece – a bruising hike. With almost exactly 90,000 Citi ThankYou points – which transfer straight to Turkish, along with Capital One miles and Bilt Rewards – and just a week to spare before those higher rates kicked in, I sprang into action and set the entire trip in motion.
Just one day after Turkish announced those award increases, my wife and I booked business class flights from Chicago-O'Hare (ORD) to Istanbul for 45,000 miles and about $218 apiece. Had we waited just another few days to start planning the rest of the trip, those same flights would have cost us another 40,000 miles total.
Thrifty Tip: If you have a choice, pick a flight on Turkish's Boeing 787s or Airbus A350-900s for a better business class experience than what you'll have in the outdated seats on the airline's Boeing 777s or Airbus A330s.
But we're not in Chicago – we live in Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP), so we'd need some positioning flights to the Windy City. That's when I noticed a quirk when redeeming Delta SkyMiles – one you can use to your advantage if you want to save some serious mileage.
A few days after setting a Google Flights price alert for a quick Delta nonstop flight, I got an email that the early morning flight we needed had dropped from $112 each to just $46.
Yet Delta was still charging 11,500 SkyMiles for that same flight. So I waited … and waited a bit longer … until about 10 hours later, when SkyMiles rates dropped as low as 3,800 miles each way. We booked a pair of main cabin award tickets for just 4,600 SkyMiles and $5.60 apiece.
I've seen this exact same pattern play out again and again and again with SkyMiles. If you want to get the best deal with your Delta miles, set some price alerts … and then have a bit of patience, waiting until rates drop to match that new, lower price.
Turkish business class was excellent: While I'm glad we didn't pay 65,000 miles apiece, I'd easily justify that rate for some of the best inflight dining and a comfortable seat all the way to Istanbul. Here's hoping that long-rumored nonstop from Minneapolis finally materializes so I can avoid connecting through my least-favorite airport in North America again…
After visiting all-too-briefly a few years back as part of a bigger trip to go hot air ballooning (is that a verb?) in Cappadocia and explore the Middle East, I was itching to get back to Istanbul.
We booked a three-night stay at the St. Regis Istanbul using Marriott free night certificates I earned from the *Bonvoy Business* back when it was offering five certificates worth up to 50,000 points apiece. That 50,000-point cap won't get you very far here in the states, but it was almost exactly what I needed to book a hotel that was otherwise charging north of $500 a night.
The hotel itself was lovely, though I wouldn't recommend the location – in the city's bougie Nişantaşi neighborhood, far from the usual haunts – for a first-timer heading to Istanbul. My favorite remains TomTom Suites, a more centrally located Small Luxury Hotels of the World (SLH) property that you can now book using Hilton Honors points.
Plus, hotels aren't the real reason you go to Istanbul. You go to explore one of the most electric cities on the globe, a place where East literally meets West (seriously: one 15-minute ferry ride brings you from Europe to Asia), steeped in centuries of history. It's a cradle of modern civilization, where you can make your way through a bazaar that was built before Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
And you go for food like this.
When I say Istanbul is one of my favorite cities in the world, this is why: For as popular as Istanbul has become in recent years, it's still one of the most underrated food destinations. And thanks to the exchange rate, it's all cheap – though rampant inflation in Turkey has put a damper on that.
Still, this detour to Istanbul was well, well worth it.
Flights Home from South Africa
Planning this trip was … let's just call it “unorthodox,” from start to finish.
Case in point: After booking those flights to Istanbul, our next step was booking flights home … from Cape Town, South Africa … while we were in Queenstown, New Zealand.
Why jump to the end so suddenly? Here's why.
In the midst of a trip to New Zealand and Australia last February, I woke up to one of Thrifty Traveler Premium‘s patented unicorn alerts for some wide-open (and incredibly rare) Qatar Qsuites business class award availability. Yes, I too gladly get high on our own supply of flight deals.
I had long hoped to book Qsuites home from South Africa using American AAdvantage miles – the airline charges just 75,000 miles each way for that almost 30-hour journey. But for the last two years, booking Qatar business class to and from the states using American miles has been virtually impossible – the airline is clearly throttling all us U.S. travelers.
But using Qatar Avios was a nice consolation prize, considering I could book the pair of us to fly from Cape Town (CPT) to Doha (DOH) and back to Miami (MIA) for 95,000 Avios and about $264 apiece in taxes and fees – though Qatar has since raised those surcharges.
While certainly not cheap, all those miles were easy to get by transferring Amex Membership Rewards points I had earned from a previous welcome bonus, everyday spending, and referring friends for the *amex gold*. Plus, doesn't this look worth 95,000 points for a full day of travel?
Read my full review of Qatar Qsuites!
As for the flights from Miami back to Minneapolis, my wife and I each had a healthy stash of Delta eCredits after rebooking previous trips when prices dropped – enough to cover all but $12 or so of our $208 one-way fares.
With a flight to Turkey locked down and flights home from Cape Town almost 11 full months in advance, we had plenty of time to figure out how to put the middle of the puzzle together and turn these two fun flights into a real trip.
And we were torn: Should we head to somewhere warm like the Seychelles or Mauritius? Follow my co-worker Gunnar's footsteps with a trip to Zanzibar?
Or was it time to make a safari happen? Yes, yes it was. That in itself was another new challenge.
Picking a Safari Lodge & Getting to South Africa
Safaris are synonymous with the words “bucket list” … but also “expensive.” Hearing stories about weeklong safaris in South Africa or Kenya that cost $10,000 or more is the norm.
We don't have that kind of money. And we didn't have that much time, either – in part because “more time” equals “more money” but also because many safari lodges way out in the bush require a series of car rides and prop plane flights that can easily add a full day of travel.
So to make a safari realistic, we had to pick our spot wisely. Where could we get in and out fairly quickly for a two- or three-night safari that wouldn't break the bank?
After more hours of research than I'd care to recount, we eventually settled on two possibilities in South Africa: Flying into Mbombela (NLP) or Hoedspruit (HDS), both on the edge of the Greater Kruger National Park and, critically, just an hour or so flight away from Johannesburg (JNB). Both cities also had nonstop flights down to Cape Town which was essential to help us piece together the rest of the trip while limiting extra travel time.
We eventually settled on the Imagine Africa Safari Lodge, just a 30- to 40-minute drive from the Hoedspruit airport. The location looked perfect to make a two-night stay (complete with four game drives) feasible, reviews were great, and the price was right.
It's not the J.W. Marriott Masai Mara – easily the most famous safari lodge bookable with points. Nor was it one of a pair of other Marriott safari properties in the works in Kenya. And while the nightly rates of roughly $750 were reasonable – at least by safari standards – I was determined to cover the cost with points. I had an ace-in-the-hole: Capital One miles.
While there are precious few options to book a safari with points, Capital One makes it easier to cover virtually any travel purchase using miles – including our safari lodge – than any other bank. Just charge it to a Venture Card, go back and erase the purchase using miles a few days later, and you're done. That $1,500 stay would cost us 150,000 Capital One miles.
After earning a 75,000-mile bonus on my *capital one venture card*, some leftover bonus miles from my wife's *venture x*, and a few thousand more miles from referring friends to either card over the years, we could easily combine our miles and have more than enough to cover the whole shebang.
The lodge itself was incredible: There were just five luxury tents with warm-and-personal service and delicious meals from sun-up to sundown – all included in our bill. But more importantly there was this…
And this …
And also this …
And this, too.
Was cashing in much of our Capital One stash for a penny apiece the best way to redeem them for maximum value? Hardly. But the entire point of points is to have experiences – not just book flights for maximum value.
And this was a surreal, life-changingly cool experience. I will never, in my life, forget the first time I saw an elephant that wasn't behind a glass wall at a zoo, watching those same elephants play in a pond days later, seeing a leopard casually slink through the tall bush grass feet from our truck, or the mix of both dread and respect as we watched a pride of lions feast on a water buffalo they had taken down hours earlier.
So I don't regret it for a second. It was one of the best experiences in my life. And that easily placed it among my favorite redemptions, period.
To top it off, our Capital One miles covered everything but tips for our incredible trackers and the rest of the lodge staff.
Getting to & Around Africa
… what were we talking about? Elephants? Oh right: Booking this trip.
We needed flights from Istanbul (IST) down to Johannesburg (JNB), over to Hoedspruit to head to our safari, and then from the bush down to Cape Town (CPT) to round out our trip before heading home. Those last two legs were pretty straightforward, so let's start with getting to South Africa.
I had initially hoped to book another nonstop Turkish Airlines business class ticket … not using Turkish's own miles again, but transferring credit card points to Singapore Airlines, as the carrier charges just 47,000 miles each way. Unfortunately, no luck: While that award rate is great on paper, the airline wasn't playing nice with releasing award space so that I could actually book it.
Remember that stash of American miles I had hoped to use to get home from South Africa with Qatar Airways but couldn't because Qatar was even stingier with award space? That isn't a problem once you leave the U.S. behind. Look at this:
While you can go months at a time without seeing a single Qatar Airways business class award bookable from the U.S. using American miles, the floodgates are open elsewhere on the globe – including the flight we needed. It was well worth making a connection through Doha to get down to South Africa in business class for just 55,000 AAdvantage miles apiece.
But that flight flight put us on the ground in Johannesburg at approximately 4 a.m. … with at least six hours to burn before our onward flight. We needed a place nearby the airport to catch up on sleep.
So I turned to the new $100 hotel credit on my *delta skymiles gold card* to book the City Lodge Hotel OR Tambo International Airport for a few hours. While basic, it was attached to the airport and – most importantly – it was a place to rest for a few hours.
By booking through Delta Stays platform on my Delta card, that $100 annual credit kicked in to cover all but $18.88 of our stay. These kind of random-yet-necessary hotel stays are an ideal way to put this credit to use, if you ask me.
Finally, back to those last two flights within South Africa. Local carrier AirLink operates nonstops from Johannesburg to and from Hoedspruit at reasonable prices: I booked them both the same way: Using Capital One Travel.
The Capital One Travel portal has a bit of a pricing problem, so the booking the fares through Capital One cost us more – and in the case of the flights to Cape Town, significantly more – than booking direct with AirLink. Still, it was the best way to book these flights because:
- We still had an annual $300 Capital One Travel credit to burn on my wife's *venture x*
- Capital One offers a price-matching guarantee: If you can find a lower price elsewhere, you can get Capital one to match it … with a catch:
- You have to book first, then call in and process the price match with a Capital One agent
- While Capital One previously paid out those price matches straight to your credit card, they're now issued as another credit to use through Capital One Travel.
Two painless, 10-minute phone calls later, we used up our $300 Venture X credit, pocketed nearly $200 in additional travel credits (which we've since used on another trip), and had our final flights of the trip on the books.
Exploring Cape Town
We spent the last five nights of the trip making our way around the Cape Town area. And while I worried it would be a letdown after an incredible safari, everything I've heard about Africa's (almost) southernmost city lived up to the hype.
First things first: We needed a car. While hiring a driver is reasonable in Cape Town – heck, pretty much everything is in South Africa – we wanted the freedom to head out to the surrounding wine regions, drive down to the Cape of Good Hope (with a pitstop to see some penguins) and go wherever we pleased, whenever we wanted.
After saving hundreds of dollars on previous rentals, I'll never start my search for a rental car anywhere but Autoslash. Six days in an automatic Ford something-or-other set us back just $165. After landing, picking up the car (and thanks to plenty of driving on the left side of the road in New Zealand last year), we were ready to hit the road.
First stop: Stellenbosch, one of the area's famed wine-producing regions. We needed a place to stay in between (cheap) meals and (even cheaper) wine tastings. And we simply don't buy the Airbnb hate: In the right spots with the right tricks to weed out bad properties, it's unbeatable.
This Airbnb, a short walk away from what wound up being one of our favorite wineries of the trip, was perfect for the two of us. The cost? Just $199.97 for a two-night stay, which we covered using $200 in Airbnb gift cards from a Christmas gift. Yes, really: We had 3 cents left.
Thrifty Tip: Of all the wineries we visited in the area, our favorites were Remhoogte (the aforementioned spot near our Airbnb), Le Lude, Constantia Glen, and especially Annandale Wines.
If you've listened to our podcast, you know I'm big on Hilton Honors. And here's a big part of the reason why: For the last three nights of our trip, I booked The Cellars-Hohenort – a wonderful Small Luxury Hotels of the World (SLH) property just outside of Cape Town proper that routinely goes for $700-plus a night in peak season – for just 50,000 points per night.
Our room was on the small side, but the grounds were jaw-droppingly gorgeous, the complimentary daily breakfast was excellent, and it was in a great location to both explore the city and also make a day trip down to the Cape of Good Hope. There's free parking onsite if you rent a car like us and free daily shuttles down to the V&A Waterfront (and other local attractions) if you don't.
Sadly, this property fell victim to Hilton's latest round of award rate increases. It'll now set you back 70,000 Hilton Honors points per night.
Bottom Line
What a trip.
It's been more than three months since we touched down back at home from this trip, and I still relish every moment. Maybe you won't copy what I did – and if going through Istanbul isn't your idea of a good time, you probably won't.
But my hope is that this sparks a few ideas for how you plan a trip to go on safari that works for you – or, if nothing else, shows you that you can, in fact, pull off a safari on a budget.
