Last time I flew Air Zimbabwe was on their 767-200 LGW-HRE overnight service, some time in the mid-1990s, and I absolutely loved it. Not least because just minutes after wheels-up, while we were still on our steep uphill ascent out of Gatwick on the way to Harare, barely breaking through the clouds, the cabin filled with the sound of two crew members pushing a fully-laden (and from the struggled sounds of things, very heavy) drinks trolley up the left hand aisle of the plane, so they could be ready and in position for when the seatbelt sign went off and they could start dishing out the booze. There was no way they intended for anyone to miss one single second of a what turned out to be a very generous drinks service. God love them – they knew their customers.
And I loved them, and their clear commitment to the cause of tipsy-flying, their ebullience & warmth, and their infectiously joyful energy. They were people who loved to fly and weren’t afraid to show it.
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Everything about those flights in the 90s was memorable, even 30-years on: from the cheery, helpful crew, to the tasty inflight meals, the abundant brandy & ginger ale, and the quirky “what ho, chaps” announcements from the flight deck (on the return leg, I vaguely remember “ladies and gentlemen we’re an extremely full flight tonight. That means we’re going to have to taxi the full 5k, right to the very edge of the runway here in Harare, if we want a decent chance of getting in the air. The alternatives are to ask some of you to get out to give us a bit push, or we just drive to London through the bush. So settle in for a long drive up the tarmac. Enjoy the bumps”).
Those journeys still stand out as my baseline for long-haul economy flights. And being Zimbabwean by birth, I was so proud of the national airline.
I was overjoyed in June to hear that after a 20-year absence, we were once again going to get a direct Air Zimbabwe service connecting London, UK with my Harare, Zimbabwe – my homeland.
I couldn’t wait to book my flights. But was I jumping the gun in a brandy-fog of nostalgic enthusiasm?
So where did it all go wrong for Air Zimbabwe?
Under the (mis)management of the Mugabe government, the financial and safety woes of state-owned Air Zimbabwe (and all of it’s many and varied Isle of Man shell companies and restructuring shenanigans- read what you want into that) are well documented, and appear to have been ongoing for over 15 years. Here’s some edited highlights:
They’ve clearly been trying to turn things round recently, but as of July 2026 it looks like things are still on the sketchier side of OK:
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- They’re still on the EC list for banned airlines
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- They’re banned on UK Air Safety List
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- And they are still having to deal with equipment troubles
Air Zimbabwe seem to have got around (or bypassed – you decided) these “minor operational inconveniences” by coming to an aircraft, crew, maintenance and insurance (ACMI) arrangement with Spanish airline Plus Ultra, who will fly a 20-year-old A330-200 workhorse EC-ONX (configured with 30 business-class and 272 economy-class seats) on the new Gatwick-Harare route.
Full listing history and photos of the plane can be found here on planespotters.net for you avgeeks out there.
But here she is in all her beauty being given a tow at Madrid Airport back in late summer, 2025 (I presume they’ll have found the missing engine bits in time to start their flights to Zim).
Plus Ultra: Who are they?
According to the trusty folk over on Tripadvisor, the reviews for Plus Ultra (aka LASER Airlines) are not exactly stellar. People seem to either love ’em, or hate ’em.
This A330 seems to have been used primarily on Spanish short/medium haul routes recently, and from what I can glean from airline reviews on YouTube, the interior looks pretty dated – particularly in business class where the 30 seats are arranged 2-2-2 (so not all have direct-aisle access) and there are no lie-flat beds.
There doesn’t seem to be any mention of (or indeed enough time left for) a retro-fit/upgrade to the interior before operations to southern Africa are scheduled to begin late July 2026. Seems like what we have, is what we’ve got,
Yikes.
So far, so… uncomfortable.
It’s a website Jim, but not as we know it
At the time of writing, I couldn’t find the LGW-HRE non-stop route listed on any of the major airline pricing aggregators or booking sites (such as Skyscanner or Google Flights), so the only way to book a ticket seemed to be directly through the Air Zimbabwe website at https://www.airzimbabwe.aero/.
My fist visit to the website was on my mobile phone (like many people researching travel and holidays), and I’m sad to say that I almost wish I hadn’t bothered. I ended up in what felt like unarmed combat with what was a truly awful, bug-ridden mobile website. And I mean, awful. Pretty much un-useable.
Initially, I wasn’t able to find anything listed but a number of weirdly-named economy fares, at three different (unexplained) prices.
Yet, strangely for an aircraft with 30 premium seats upfront that need selling, there was no way to book anything in business class at all.
Eventually, I opted to try my luck and go ahead and book something in coach in the vague hope I might get presented with an option to upgrade to business class later. But not even that was an option. Coach seemed to be all that was on offer. Seems I had made my choice, and Air Zim was determined that I was going to have to stick with it.
So in a petulant hissy fit, I abandoned my booking journey, and because I’d then left the site open on my phone mid-journey, my website session timed out. It was at that point that the airline-booking-fairy (she’s a thing, right?) must have heard my loud, very creative swearing, taken pity on me, and one-click later I found myself taken to a totally different booking engine on the website. Here (at last!) I was given the opportunity of buying one of the Air Zimbabwe ultra-elusive business class tickets.
Now let’s be blunt. Having such a crappy mobile website is a problem for an airline that wants to be taken seriously. Increasingly, customers expect to pay for (and manage) travel bookings on their mobile devices (https://travelweekly.co.uk/news/flight-bookings-by-mobile-central-to-airline-passenger-journeys-iata-finds). When your mobile website is as broken as this, that’s money most-likely walking away into the online baskets of your competitors.
(In their defence, the desktop version of the Air Zim website was much more usable, and the airline seemed much happier to allow me to both find AND book a seat in the pointy end of the plane. Huzzah. Double brandy & ginger all round!)
But these super-rare business class seats come at a price (and I don’t just mean my patience).
Because the “value-based pricing” that Air Zim had adopted for their coach seats was nowhere to be found in their business class offering. Instead, the airline seemed to be channeling Qatar in their pricing, and a return flight was coming in north of US$3,200. Which is pokey to say the least, considering their fellow African competitors offered lounge access and a lie-flat seat (at least on the leg out of London) for less. And they weren’t ranked meh on Tripadvisor like Plus Ultra/LASER
Not only that, but try as a might, I couldn’t find any terms or conditions about the tickets anywhere. Not even a whiff of a description about what I was reserving. Nada. Not a sausage about refund/rebooking policies, luggage, lounges…. In fact, nothing about what I got for ponying up the cost of a small second-hand car. All the things that encourage people to pay to turn left as they board were missing. The entire booking engine was a “terms-free” zone.
Users to leave the booking engine completely and read the highly editorialised Experience section in the main menu. And that isn’t just weird – it comes across as downright sketchy to me.
This seemly lackadaisical approach to the important stuff “policies” and “contracts” and “legal info” is going to be a very serious problem for an airline with reputational issues, and which now wants to be taken seriously. If Air Zim wants to start playing in the same league as more established competitors, time to step its game up. A lot.
Not least because the US$3,212 return business class fare is a lot of my hard, cold cash to gamble on an as-yet untried and untested new route, on an airline which has recent history of Air Zimbabwe, and where I would be booking a ticket without recognised travel association backing.
Would I book Air Zimbabwe for my flight from London to Harare?
For the moment, no. And here’s why:
- Plus Ultra seems a mixed-bag of an airline, with a jaded hard-product and none of the old-skool Air Zim in-flight joy
- The business class tickets are just too expensive at the moment
- There’s no guarantee that this route will still be running by the time I want to board my flight. And without the protection of an international travel body, the chances of getting my money back would be slim to Mugabe.
So for now, I’m going to let others discover whether Air Zimbabwe has indeed returned to something close to it’s former glory, r whether (as I suspect might the reality) it’s long-haul product is more like the “Spirit Airlines of Southern Africa”.
I look forward to reading the reviews from the comfort of my lie-flat business class seat on Rwandair/Kenyan/Ethopian Airways on my way to Harare later this summer.
If they have, (and I really hope they do – a direct flight from London to Harare could be a game-changer for the local economy. And for me too, not gonna lie. I need a regular sadza fix) I’ll be front of the queue at check-in, eagerly awaiting 10 hours of great food and bottomless brandy and ginger ale.
But until then, ndine urombo, shamwari, not yet
Main image: (c) Dmitry Puchigin