FASTJET PLANS TO EXTEND FLIGHTS FROM JOHANNESBURG TO ZANZIBAR COME JANUARY
(Posted 30th November 2015)
Usually well informed sources have given the clearest indication yet, after rumours from the grapevine swept this correspondent’s inbox repeatedly in recent days that Fastjet plans to return to Zanzibar, a route briefly served but then dropped due to unsatisfactory loadfactors in the early stages of their Tanzania operation.
The new routing will take into account the growing demand for vacations by South Africans for Zanzibar, an island presently visited by this correspondent.
The routing of the flight will therefore be in conjunction with the daily service from Johannesburg to Dar es Salaam, continuing on to the Spice Island after a brief stop in Tanzania’s commercial capital.
This will peg Fastjet against South Africa’s Mango which presently flies twice a week nonstop on the route. Tourism stakeholders on Zanzibar have warmly welcomed the move, which is due for a formal announcement soon. More flights means more seats, helping to fill the beds in the many new resorts which have sprung up of late but also in established properties.
Zanzibar has two key tourism components, culture and history, best explored from the Stone Town hotels like the Zanzibar Serena, where heritage and contemporary blends best, though there are other hotels too inside the UNESCO World Heritage site, including some more recent arrivals by international brand names.
The other component is of course the vacation element on the award winning beaches which ring the island from one end to the other and across. From there, as well as from the Stone Town hotels, can visits be made to the famous plantations where spices are grown for export and domestic consumption or the slave trade sites of old as Zanzibar was one of the main market places for African slaves along the Eastern African seaboard. Zanzibar is connected by air to Dar es Salaam via Coastal Aviation, Auric Air and Precision Air with flights lasting less than half an hour, to Nairobi with Kenya Airways and to other more distant destinations by Qatar Airways, Fly Dubai, Condor and Ethiopian, among others.
For breaking and regular aviation news look no further than this page!
