Safari Plus: Connecting the Main Tourist Attractions in Tanzania

Lauriano Balilemwa, Accountable Manager of Safari Plus, gives an overview of the company. Safari Plus is Tanzania’s first high-end charter airline. It connects all the main tourist attractions in the country, such as Dar es Salaam, Arusha and Zanzibar.

“Safari Plus was founded in 2009. The intention of the owner was to accommodate the kind of high end services that you get at the hotel; at that time it was the Kilimanjaro Hotel Kempinski. There was another hotel in Zanzibar which was called Zanzibar Kempinski and another in the Serengeti which was called Bilila Kempinski. Those three hotels were tourist centres. When you fly for tourism in Tanzania you have to reach Zanzibar for the beach and you have to go to the north to see the animals and to have the safari experience. The owner´s vision and strategy was to ensure better connectivity because there were no connections between Zanzibar and the Serengeti where you find the Seronera and Dar es Salaam. There are some general aviation operators but because of the nature of the business that they do, if you leave Dar es Salaam at 9am you will be in Seronera at 4pm. It means a whole day of travelling to move from place to place and on a small single engine caravan that is very worrying and tiring. So our owner wanted to come up with a brand and a service to offer to the high end tourist or client, for example someone who comes out of the Kilimanjaro Hotel and gets on a plane to fly to Zanzibar where he can maybe have breakfast and then fly on to Seronera. Zanzibar is just fifteen minutes and Seronera is one hour and 40 minutes. If you leave Dar es Salaam at 7am you can have breakfast in Zanzibar and then fly to Seronera where you can do a safari all day and spend the night in Bilila which was impossible before. That is the concept behind the creation of that triangle connecting the three destinations. This was not really on offer before and even if it was, the time was an issue, because people of that level were not interested in spending their whole day travelling because it would mean that they were too tired to enjoy the safari the next day. Just imagine going on a flight for 15 minutes in the air, ten minutes landing, then an hour later another flight, then another… a whole day flying is quite an exhausting experience. We wanted to provide a kind of bridge to make sure that the three points which are hot spots for tourism were connected. We used the twin engine Beechcraft 1900 which is pressurised, and has a stand up cabin with a two person crew to operate it and is a luxury configured plane. You ask what kind of service we give… we knew by the concept of the owner that the whole issue was to provide a service that was going to be for the high end client; the intention was that people would go out of the hotels and want a high end service just as they received in the hotel. We did that for 2 years, working the connection between Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar, Zanzibar and Seronera which is the Serengeti and then Seronera to Dar es Salaam once more. Between 2011 and 2012 we did that route with scheduled services. We would fly every day. We flew to Seronera three times a week because of the nature of the clientele that we had and we flew to Arusha daily and to Zanzibar every day. We were able to accommodate the market that was created by then. We were focused on tourism”, says Lauriano Balilemwa.