Indian ‘invasion’ on, all World Cup flights overbooked

KOLKATA: It's the 'final call' for passengers boarding flights to Johannesburg and Cape Town. Anyone who's waitlisted can simply wish his chances of watching a World Cup match at Springbok-land goodbye. South Africa, which already boasts of a significant Indian population, can expect a mini-Indian invasion in the next 72 hours, with all four South African Airlines flights leaving Mumbai this week already overbooked.SOTC, the official travel agent from India for World Cup 2003, also have their hands full. All their specially packaged World-Cup Special tours to South Africa are fully booked. We run four flights every week from Mumbai and this week all our flights are absolutely full, confirmed an official at South Africa Airlines' Mumbai office when contacted by TNN on Friday. SA flights from India are all Boeing 747 aircraft with a seating capacity of over 300. Back on the ground SOTC, which is one of the two official travel agents for the World Cup and the lone official agent from Kolkata, refused to quote the exact number of passengers they had booked for their World Cup package tours but reported that they are 'full house'. We have exhausted our quota of seats on all South Africa trips. People are still calling up to book seats and we are having a tough time refusing them, said Dipankar Das, an official at SOTC's Kolkata office. Officials from Cox & Kings said they had already booked over 250 people to South Africa for the Cup. We have designed customised tours for groups of 20 people or more, specially for the World Cup. We do have regular 7-day or 10-day tours but few would want a tour of the country during this time, unless we manage to take people to different World Cup venues at the times they want, an official at the agency's city office said. A normal seven-day tour to South Africa (Cape Town, Johannesburg, Sun City) costs Rs 60,000 to 65,000 per person including airfare. On location these tours include all meals, entrance fees, sight seeing and all inland transport costs. However, customised tours can be more expensive and go up to Rs 80,000 per person depending on the length of stay.