After a 28-year absence, Air France has resumed direct service from Paris to Dar es Salaam, opening the 31st route in sub-Saharan Africa.
Zanzibar, where the airline has been operating since October 2021 with two weekly flights into the Abeid Amani Karume International Airport, is now joined by Dar es Salaam as the second destination in Tanzania.
The airline will use 279-seat 787-9s, its second-smallest wide-body after the A330-200, to fly to Dar es Salaam three times a week.
Following a decision by Zanzibar’s Airports Authority (ZAA) mandating airlines that desire to use Terminal 3 building to sign with Dnata, the authority’s preferred ground handler, the airline had threatened to sever the Dar es Salaam route and leave the market in January.
KLM and Air France were only able to continue operating at the recently constructed Terminal 3 thanks to diplomatic intervention.
Dar’s addition now makes Nairobi, which Air France began operating in March 2018, totally nonstop in both directions. There are now three flights through Zanzibar and four nonstop flights to Nairobi.
Booking information reveals a small 8,500 roundtrip point-to-point market between January and September 2022 for flights between Paris and Dar, which is not unusual.
For the entire year 2019, it was only about 11,500. Because Tanzania has never been a colony, Air France will concentrate exclusively on transit travellers over CDG. It will be the same as KLM’s daily Dar service over Amsterdam and Turkish Airlines’ daily flight over Istanbul.
London, by far Dar’s largest European market, however, continues to lack nonstop access, despite British Airways’ 767-300ER service there up until 2013.
With more than 50,000 roundtrip P2P travellers in 2019, it had a local market that was four times bigger than Amsterdam and five times bigger than Paris.
It still relies on nonstop flights over hubs in the Middle East, including Amsterdam, Istanbul, Addis Abeba, Nairobi, and shortly Paris.
