Thread title sounds like a UEFA match but I'm interested in folks' experiences travelling from the U.S. to Windhoek via London Gatwick as opposed to Frankfurt. Air Namibia operates out of both locations so I'm curious to know if there are any distinct advantages or disadvantages in routing through the UK. There aren't as many flights per week but I don't think that makes much of a difference, provided you've planned the trip well and in advance.

Thanks for any insights.

Great question! I went the Frankfurt route in 2007, largely because it fell on the desired days of the week for my travel. Everything through Frankfurt went without a hitch and our baggage and guns arrived in WDH the same time we did. We even took the train to downtown during the 11-hour layover and enjoyed fine German beer and sausages.

I would be delighted to go the London route next time if it works as well as Frankfurt, if for no other reason than to see some place new. I can see no intrinsic reason that it should not, but then the Brits have a reputation for doing things the hard way while the Germans have a reputation for practicality.

I'd love to have comments from someone who has transited Gatwick on this route!

I have only heard bad things about traveling through London. It seems a few English airport folks dislike guns & yours may not make it on the plane in transfer. I'll take my chances w/ Lufthansa & Frankfurt.

quote:

Originally posted by fredj338:
I have only heard bad things about traveling through London. It seems a few English airport folks dislike guns & yours may not make it on the plane in transfer. I'll take my chances w/ Lufthansa & Frankfurt.

I'd love to have comments from someone who has transited Gatwick on this route!

. . . rather than just heresay.

Been thinking about this route and one factor to weigh is that most(all?) BA flights from the states end up in Heathrow. The folks at Gracy expressed some concern about the transfer over to Gatwick. I have used BA 2X and it was THE BEST overall service. Like you guys, still thinking it through....

From things I have heard and read, there is always a potential problem associated with this.

If you fly into Gatwick, but something happens that bumps your flight to Heathrow (like your plane is down for maintenance and the only one leaving for your destination is at Heathrow), then you have to pay a private, licensed contractor to transfer your firearm to the other airport, and it is expensive and fraught with peril.

Not to mention the anti-gunners that might screw with your gun.

Best bet - email Kathi at Wild Travel and ask her - she's sent a lot of people to a lot of places and is well-versed in this stuff.

Gentlemen.
Never fly via London Gatwick or Heathrow when you bring guns. They hate hunters and will do anything to ruin your trip or your guns. European hunters awoid London, we are just not welcome there.
I am flying to Zimbabwe in august and im paying 1000 usd more pr ticket to fly over Frankfurt than if i had flown via London, it is just not worth it taking that risk. In Frankfurt they are used to handle guns, and treat pepole with respect. I have never had any problems there at all.

Rodam,

Thanks for the first-hand experience. What specific sorts of problems did you encounter when you went through Gatwick?

Last year in May a friend and I flew to Windhoek through Frankfurt and came back to the states through Gatwick. We booked it with Gracy Travel and had the same soft warning others get that sometimes there is trouble with firearms in London. As long as your airline has a baggage agreement with AirNamibia it shouldn't be a problem.

Going over through Frankfurt was no problem for any of us (4 total travelers with 8 bags total.) My clothes bag was the one that didn't make it to Windhoek on time with us. Air Namibia made arrangements to get the bag to us on our tour 48 hours later (next flight from Frankfurt). No big deal - I just borrowed one set of clothes from my friend for a day and all was fine.

However, Going home through London was slightly different. When we checked our bags in Windhoek through Gatwick, Atlanta and Albuquerque one of the bags (the Tuffpack with three rifles) had the wrong tracking number attached to it. I suspected the agent that checked us in was inexperienced and screwed up the tags. When we made it to Gatwick about one hour before our flight to Atlanta I was asked over the intercom to proceed to the gate for some questions?!! The agent was very nice and started by saying "We think we know what happened but we want to make sure we have your correct bag - can we please escort you down to the tarmac and could you identify the bag in question?" After about ten minutes of talking with three fully armed very serious and incredibly polite airport police we ID'd the Tuffpac, filled out the police report and had a great visit about our African hunt. These guys knew exactly what had happened with the bag mixup, said it happens once in a while and could not have been nicer to us. They seemed genuinely interested in the hunt we had, commented about our rifles and were anything but anti hunters / anti gun.

All the people we encountered at Gatwick were professional, expedient and were much more polite than I have ever encountered in any airport in the states. It just wasn't the big deal other people have gotten into. If the agent in Windhoek hadn't screwed up the tag on the rifle case I don't suspect any of this would have happened.

I also thought it was great going through a different place and would not hesitate it go through Gatwick again on my next African trip.

Well in a couple of months I can give my 1st hand report. I booked a group of 5 of us through Gracy going and coming to Naminia through Gatwick. Now that being said, of the 5 of us going, only 1 guy has a gun. The rest are all bowhunting. We couldn't go through Frankfurt because of schedule conflicts. I guess we'll see...I hope for the best.

Marvin,

Thanks for the report. I've never visited Britain, but your description is typical of the British politeness that has been described to me by others. Canadians seem to largely share this trait with their Limey cousins. Americans seem to have long since outgrown politeness.

We had a failure by the Windhoek agent for Air Namibia to properly tag our bags, also, but this involved her mistaken insistence that they could only be routed as far as Atlanta, and not to our ultimate U.S. destination. This caused us difficulties and delays transiting Atlanta. Fortunately, our connecting flight was delayed several hours due to weather so both we and our baggage ultimately made the flight. Our route home was through Frankfurt, but this is irrelavent since the agent's mistake would have had the same effect regardless of the connecting European airport.

Lesson: Be sure to insist that the Air Namibia gate agent check your baggage all the way to your final destination. You will have to claim your bags to go through Customs at the airport of entry, but if they are already tagged with your destination airport you will not have to re-check them. Our problem was that we were instructed (wrongly) to simply dump our bags down the baggage chute after going through customs. One of our party did drop his first bag before realizing that it was only tagged for ATL. He spent two hours chasing it around the airport before he finally found it in the baggage area where local Atlanta passengers pick up. THEN he had to pass back through security before being able to check the bag and go to his gate. It was a near disaster, avoided only by the incompetence of Delta to actually have an airplane leave on time. Gratefully, we had been able to wrangle passes to the Delta Crown Room for this trip, where we exacted as much retribution as we could drink against the airline.

I flew thru Heathrow this week. I used PDQ Freight to help transfer our guns on the way thru on May 10. Bob Nagra was incredibly helpful and made the entire process easy. We skipped the long lines and were escorted to a private room where the customs officers were very polite and curious about our trip. On the way home, we checked our bags all the way thru from Windhoek to Dallas. While in London I was asked (and escorted) down to the tarmac to identify my gun cases which were escorted by FIVE customs officers that were very excited to see my guns and check serial numbers. They then put my guns on our flight home. If your tickets were purchased after September 24 you will have problems traveling thru England with firearms. Go thru Frankfurt.

quote:

Originally posted by 450/400:
If your tickets were purchased after September 24 you will have problems traveling thru England with firearms. Go thru Frankfurt.

450/400,

Could you please elaborate some more on the Sept. 24 dead-line? Is there some more restrictive legislation or policies being instituted on this date? I am not scheduled to be in Namibia until 2009 so any further information would be most appreciated.

Thanks for the information and relating your experiences.

Stonecreek,

You must have received the exact same info from the same Air Namibia desk agent as we did. She said that it was impossible to check our bags any further than Atlanta and that we would have to claim and recheck them there. Luckily our hunting guide (the PH's wife) was with us and would not take no for an answer and raised a big fuss at the desk. The head or Senior check-in agent later agreed that we could check the bags to Albuquerque and redid them all except for the Tuffpack with the guns. This was the one we didn't catch until we got in to Gatwick.

Hopefully, they have retrained some of the agents so that it won't happen anymore but I wouldn't hold my breath on it.

We are considering going through London with the day layover on our way to Mozambique next year. I wouldn't mind seeing some of London on a bus tour like we did in Frankfurt last year. That was well worth the time to do.

quote:

You must have received the exact same info from the same Air Namibia desk agent as we did.

Well, at least when they are wrong they are consistently wrong .

Unrelated to this discussion, but our biggest laugh we had was going through customs in Atlanta. Customs agents insisted on spraying the soles of our hunting boots with some kind of yellow "gunk", presumably to disinfect all of the virulent pathogens from the African soil. The customs agents only wanted to spray one pair of boots, no matter how many you might have carried and worn. They were not interested in the footwear we had on, despite the fact that we had tramped for a couple of hours around a game preserve outside of Windhoek in those shoes just prior to boarding the plane. Apparently, their manual says "African hunters, spray one pair of boots".

We can all rest easy that the Homeland is Secure.

We had a similar problem coming home, I went round and round with the Air Namibia gate agent who insisted she could not check my tuffpac through to Atlanta, but only to Frankfurt, turns out it didn't get a proper tag, I asked about status of our luggage and luckily the Delta agent at Frankfurt was an "old hand", he called the baggage handlers, only words I understood of the 1/2 of the conversation I could hear was Tuffpac and my name. They found it, put new, proper tag on it, and all turned out well.

I had originally wanted to go via London, stop off to visit friends etc., entirely to much hassel and expense when traveling with a rifle.

Copming back into IAH (Houston) they said I couldn't have my Oryx jerky (still sealed in the bag) because of hoof and mouth disease, but they didn't spray my boots. I told them I had been around cattle, swine, sheep and goats on my paperwork.
Really disappointed, I even put on top of everything in anticipation of them being sprayed!
Robert

Robert, you've totally shattered my faith. No telling what kind of Weapons of Mass Destruction are being smuggled into Houston via unsprayed hunting boots this very minute! At least they're stopping the terrorist oryx jerky. The conscientious agents in Atlanta zilched our smoked, fully cooked oryx backstraps, also.

JPenn, you said: "I had originally wanted to go via London, stop off to visit friends etc., entirely to much hassel and expense when traveling with a rifle."

When you do a stopover EITHER in London or in Frankfurt, what kind of arrangements can be made for holding your guns? I know that this question has been batted about some on this forum, but I've seen little from folks who have actually done it. Have you checked into how to do it and what it takes? I'd love to take a few days in Europe on my next trip, but I'm clueless as to how to mangage guns during the stopover.

I've been to England a couple of times and the much vaunted English politeness is basically pure bullshit. It may have been true 40 years ago, but it isn't really applicable now. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the Brits, and had a great time but universal politeness, not really. The same can be said, in reverse of New York, the people there have a bad rap, and on many trips there, I find it to be undeserved. I'm sure this will be greeted like the proverbial turd in the punch bowl, but if you speak a smattering of French, you'll be much better treated in Paris than in London in my experience, not to mention the food and wine is not even on the same level of consideration.

just came back 2 days ago from Namibia via Joberg (SAA flight and what a bunch of lets make hard it for hunters folks, and lets also not check the special security area cargo hold on the plane when it lands for any guncase) and London with British Air who I thoughyt were much better and not the anti gun freaks some times made out to be. I had to do 1 extra piece of paper for BA when checking in since in had guns and they placed hand filled out luggage tags on my gun case an suitcase with ammo in it. Compared to the SAA flight and their attitude about weight allowances (they charged me over $100.00 bucks since I was over their impartically low weight limit), BA was superb and when I politely asked gate agents at aircraft boarding time about status of my bags, which they did and confirmed they were loaded on the next aircraft, British Air was not the ogre airlines I've readand heard about. All my London connections were into and out of Heathrow so have no experience with the heathrow and Gatwick thing.
Willi

Going to Namibia via Gatwick in Mid-Sept 07, the flight from Gatwick to Windhoek was 24 hours late. Gatwick CLOSES some nights from about midnite to 5am!!, We had to exit the International area, go thru customs, and then, 5 hrs later, come back thru customs to get to the flight.
On the return (Oct), I was called by the Intercom to go to a customs agent. He had questions about the rifles and ammo. But everything ended up OK.
My PH had accompanied me to the airport and had made sure the bags were tagged correctly.

Any other observations regarding Air Namibia's reliability?

quote:

Originally posted by Gatogordo:
I've been to England a couple of times and the much vaunted English politeness is basically pure bullshit. It may have been true 40 years ago, but it isn't really applicable now. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the Brits, and had a great time but universal politeness, not really. The same can be said, in reverse of New York, the people there have a bad rap, and on many trips there, I find it to be undeserved. I'm sure this will be greeted like the proverbial turd in the punch bowl, but if you speak a smattering of French, you'll be much better treated in Paris than in London in my experience, not to mention the food and wine is not even on the same level of consideration.

SOrry, now I'm calling My exp. traveling through Paris 20yrs ago, is they despise anyone from the US & speaking HS French only hastens their arrogance. I'm sure that hasen't goitten better. The French need to get over themselves.
I'm flying through Frankfurt to Namibia this fall on Lufthansa. We plan on staying over on the way back for 3 days. I'll report on the whole firearms in transit issue when I get back. FWIW, I'm buying enough insurance to cover my "lost" guns twice over.