South Africa Airports is an independent reference site about the country’s airports and about travelling in South Africa. It is not run by an airport, an airline, an airport operator or a tourism board, and it is not affiliated with any of them.
Why this site exists
Airport information online tends to come in two forms. Official sites are accurate but thin: they will tell you a terminal exists, not which end of it has somewhere to eat at six in the morning. Aggregator sites are thick but unreliable: they recycle each other, repeat figures nobody has checked in years, and quote opening hours that changed two timetables ago.
We are trying to sit between the two. Every factual claim is traced to a source we name. Every passenger figure is read out of the operator’s own filing rather than copied from a press release, and checked against that document’s own totals. Where something is a judgement — whether a connection is comfortable, whether a transfer is worth the money — we say so plainly instead of dressing it up as fact.
What the site covers
Twenty-two South African airports have scheduled passenger flights and an IATA code. We are working through them, starting with the busiest, and the plan is to cover all of them properly rather than most of them thinly.
For each airport that means the things people actually search for at the moment they need them: how to get into town and what it costs, where to leave a car, what is open after security and until when, where the lounges are and who can use them, how long to allow for a connection, and what the airport is genuinely like to wait in.
Around that we cover travelling in the country more broadly — flying between cities, hiring a car, the long-distance bus and rail network, entry requirements, money, connectivity, and the destinations each airport exists to serve. An airport is only ever the first ten minutes of a trip.
Who writes it
The site is written and maintained by a small independent editorial team. We are not South African government employees, aviation industry staff or travel agents, and we have no commercial relationship with any airport, airline or operator mentioned on the site.
That independence is the point, and it cuts both ways: it means nobody pays us to recommend a service, and it also means we have no privileged access. What we publish, we publish because it is documented. Our sourcing note sets out exactly which documents.
How the site is funded
The site carries display advertising. That is its only source of revenue.
We do not take payment for coverage, we do not publish sponsored articles, and we do not accept free flights, lounge access or accommodation in exchange for writing about them. No advertiser sees an article before it is published or has any say in what it says. Adverts are labelled as adverts.
What advertising revenue buys is the time to read primary documents instead of rewriting other people’s summaries. The privacy policy explains what advertising means for your data and how to opt out of personalised ads.
Getting in touch
Corrections are genuinely welcome — a reference site that will not be corrected is not a reference site. If something here is out of date, incomplete or simply wrong, the contact page explains how to reach us, and the editorial policy explains what we do about it.