Abidjan - Post Report Question and Answers
What is your home city/country? How long is the trip to post from there, with what connections? How easy/difficult is it to travel to this city/country?
DC. 8ish hr flight to Brussels or Paris, 7 hr flight to Abidjan. - Mar 2021
Original home is DC but HOR is a small town in MA. Pre-Covid, USG used flights through Paris or Brussels. 7 hours from CDI to Europe, transit, then 8 or so to get to East Coast of USA. - May 2020
USA. At the time of this publication, there is a 3x weekly flight on Ethiopian Airlines to/from New York JFK International Airport. However, if one is on US government orders, then you may not use this flight for official purposes as it is not an approved code share route. Depending on the origin from the U.S., one will either be on a United codeshare via Brussels on Brussels Airlines, or on a Delta codeshare via Paris CDG on Air France. Air France is currently operating three flights a day to Paris, and Brussels operates flights daily (depending on the day the flight may go via Ouagadougou or another city first). Many major international carriers operate flights to Abidjan (Turkish, Emirates, TAP, MEA, Corsair, Royal Air Maroc, South African, Ethiopian, Kenyan) however, many of these flights go to another Subsaharan African destination first. - Feb 2020
From the US east coast, fly from Boston to either Paris or Brussels and then down to Abidjan. - Mar 2017
Usually Washington or the American Midwest, and it takes about 20 hours for two flights and a typical layover in Europe. Most RT flights to the US will run you $1500-2000 since there's little competition for this market. For Delta frequent fliers, all the Air France flights connect through Paris, and there are daily non-stop overnight flights. They started flying the A380 about 4 days a week, which is an impressive feat for West Africa. It's a 500-passenger double-decker plane, so it strains the airport's capacity when it flies into Abidjan. United frequent fliers can take Air Brussels, which also has a daily overnight flight direct to Brussels, but it stops for an hour most days in Burkina or Togo, etc. Some people take the 1-hour flight to Accra and fly on Delta direct to JFK, but connecting in Accra is lousy. Royal Air Maroc is probably the cheapest option, but I've heard it's not worth the hassle. Emirates and Turkish airlines are also slightly cheaper, but you're going in the wrong direction to get to the States. There were rumors 6 months ago that a direct flight would open up between Abidjan and Washington, but it seemed to fall through. The airport here, which is probably the nicest in West Africa, was recently certified for direct flights to the US, so one can hope. - Aug 2015
