Safari and beach in one trip, on one plane, straight from London. British Airways has confirmed a new triangular route linking London Gatwick with Kilimanjaro and Zanzibar, launching on 29 May 2027 and running three times a week through the northern summer until 31 October.
The service, numbered BA2163, departs Gatwick at 9:05 AM and lands at Kilimanjaro at 8:20 PM after roughly 13 hours in the air. The same Boeing 777-200ER then hops down to Zanzibar, arriving at 10:25 PM. After a two-hour turnaround, the aircraft heads back to Gatwick, touching down at 7:55 AM the next morning. BA says the timings are designed to fit school-holiday travel, and the routing means you can choose Kilimanjaro for the safari parks or Zanzibar for the Indian Ocean beaches — or do both on the same ticket.
BA's chief planning and strategy officer Neil Chernoff pitched the route as a way to strengthen the airline's East African footprint, and the move puts it in good company. Several European carriers already use similar one-stop patterns on Tanzania routes: Air France flies to Kilimanjaro via Zanzibar, KLM reaches Dar es Salaam through Kilimanjaro, Italy's Neos stops at Kilimanjaro en route to Zanzibar from Milan, and Turkish Airlines also funnels Istanbul traffic through Kilimanjaro to the island. Air Tanzania, meanwhile, flies to Moscow via Zanzibar and has reportedly been looking at launching its own Gatwick service with Boeing 787s around July 2027.
The numbers explain the interest. Dar es Salaam handled about 2.9 million passengers in 2024, Zanzibar around 2.7 million in 2025, and Kilimanjaro just over one million — a growing market where the big European carriers are fighting for leisure traffic. For BA, it's part of a broader African network of roughly 391 departures a month from London, split between Heathrow (Cairo, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Nairobi, Lagos and more) and Gatwick (Accra, Algiers, Marrakesh, Mauritius, Rabat).
For travellers, this is a genuinely convenient product. Instead of booking separate flights or a safari-plus-beach itinerary with awkward connections, you get Kilimanjaro — gateway to Mount Kilimanjaro treks and the Serengeti circuit — and Zanzibar's famous spice-island beaches on a single service. It also opens up Gatwick as a starting point, handy for anyone in southeast England who'd rather skip the Heathrow slog. Tickets aren't on sale details haven't been confirmed in full, but with the route less than a year out, it's one to watch for 2027 summer holidays.