Dar to Dubai: 19 times a week

When earlier this week Emirates upped their daily flights from Dubai to Dar es Salaam to twelve a week, it followed hot on the heels of the inaugural flight by “cousins” flydubai, which also just commenced daily flights from Dubai to Dar es Salaam with extensions to Kilimanjaro and Zanzibar.

These latest developments increase the combined flights by the two Dubai-based airlines from 7 per week to 19, a massive increase in seat capacity by any standards and a mighty incentive to fill those seats, both ways.

Tourism operators have already started to work out how they can tap into the flydubai destination markets to bring visitors to the beaches of Zanzibar or into the safari parks of the northern circuit. On the other hand, traders and their associations have seen opportunities to expand their own businesses not just to Dubai and the rest of the Gulf, but considering the low fares even beyond, into the destinations offered by the airline.

Meanwhile, Emirates itself has gone into overdrive to sell and market their own capacity increase, which includes, besides the seats, also added cargo space.

“Dar es Salaam is an important destination in our east African network. In our last financial year, we carried over 180,000 customers on the route, and this second service is expected to further boost trade and tourism growth, and will also offer our customers more choice and convenience from Tanzania to Dubai and onward to Europe, the United States, India, and the Fast East, as well as other destinations across Emirates extensive global network,” said Khalid Al Zarouni, Emirates Country Manager for Tanzania before adding, “This second service also makes Dar es Salaam the second destination in East Africa, after Nairobi, to have more than a daily frequency.”

The new flight is operated with an Airbus A330-200 in a three-class configuration with 12 seats in First Class, 42 in Business Class, and 183 in Economy Class. This adds a total of 2,370 seats and up to 170 tons of cargo capacity a week on the route.

The new Emirates flight service operates on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. It departs Dubai as EK727 at 1655 hours and arrives in Dar es Salaam at 2150 hours. The return flight EK728 departs Dar es Salaam at 2330 hours and arrives in the Dubai the next morning at 0620 hours offering excellent connectivity both ways.

With the options now wide open to cooperate and partner with either the full service, award-winning Emirates or else go the way of a low-cost carrier like flydubai, the Tanzanian tourism industry will have a perfect platform to go out and promote their services and put packages together which can help to attract more inbound traffic not just from existing markets by especially from new and emerging markets served by both airlines.