Travel from Nigeria to Bahamas, avoiding transit in US, UK and Canada
- By
- Aparna Patel
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- 2 Aug, 2023
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Flights between Angola and Cuba have existed for a very, very long time but as with many/most flights to Cuba they can’t be found in normal search engines. Currently TAAG flies it once a week: DT 702 / DT 703 (currently Friday towards Havana and Sunday towards Luanda). And now TAAG serves Lagos three times a week, Monday / Wednesday / Friday: DT 564 / DT 565 (and Arik Air also flies this leg). As I mentioned you can’t even find the Cuba flight online much less book it but you could try various agents of TAAG like https://www.atlantidawtaviagens.com/ or https://summerwindgsa.com/en/taag-angola-designates-summerwind-as-general-sales-agent-gsa-for-spain/ or https://www.discovertheworld.com/news_article.php?nid=64. After that Cubana de Aviación or Bahamasair will get you to Nassau from Havana. Note Cubana website doesn’t show the Nassua flight (and apparently never did, as this 11 year old post shows) but Havanatur does. Bahamasair have no such problems.
If this once a week option doesn’t fit your schedule there are other options: Turkish Airlines flies from Lagos to Istanbul and they now fly to Panama City from Istanbul (it seems the Istanbul-Panama City flight has a stop in Bogota but coming back it’s direct see announcement) and from Panama City, Copa Air flies to Nassau and it is possible a good travel agent could make this a single booking as Turkish and Copa are both Star Alliance. As far as I am aware, both Panama and Turkey is such you don’t go through immigration when in transit so no visa required if you don’t want to leave the transit area of the airport. Turkey has eVisa if you want to look around.
While more possibilities exist via Brazil, these are all four flights in each direction where Turkish + Copa is “only” three in one direction and four in the other.
The website FlightConnections.com is pretty good for answering this sort of question. Playing around with it, it looks like you could do it in three flights as follows:
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Lagos or Abuja to either a Schengen airport (Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt) or to Istanbul;
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From there to either Havana or Panama City;
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From there to Nassau.
No one airline serves all of these flights, so you may need to purchase multiple tickets. If you do this, be sure to leave ample time between them. I’m also not sure what the transit visa policies of Turkey, Cuba, or Panama are with respect to Nigerian citizens; but I do know that the Schengen area will require you to apply for a transit visa in advance.
Note that FlightConnections.com can be misleading concerning which non-stop legs actually exist. For example, the map appears to show Turkish airlines as flying non-stop from Istanbul to Panama City, but the Turkish Airlines website shows that this is a direct flight (not non-stop) with a stop in Bogota. Similarly, the flight from Istanbul to Havana is non-stop, but the return flight from Havana stops in Caracas.
I took a look at the website for the international airport in the Bahamas. It lists arrivals, both domestic (other Bahamian airports) and international. Almost all the international arrivals are from the US, and one is from Toronto. I did spot:
- Cap Haitien, Haiti
- Providenciales, Turks and Caicos
- Havana, Cuba
- Panama City, Panama
- London, England
I might have missed a non-US destination there. Now your problem is figuring out how to get to one of those places. All except London are on the same side of the Atlantic as the Bahamas and may have the same issues. But there is a flight from London. The body of your question mentions not transiting through the UK, but the title does not. If you can go through the UK, this could work. If not you’ll have to look for flights to these other airports.
If you can transit through France but not England, look for flights to former French colonies in the Caribbean, and then shorter flights from those Caribbean places to the Bahamas. Haiti is a good first choice.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘