Flights from Dar es Salaam to Nairobi (DAR-NBO): Airlines, USD Fares

Flights Dar es Salaam -> Nairobi (DAR-NBO) — USD Fares, Airlines, Frequency

14 scheduled departures a week link Dar es Salaam (DAR) in Tanzania with Nairobi (NBO) — about 2 a day — flown by 1 catalogued carrier at a scheduled block time near 1.5 hours. Our catalogue scores corridor demand 8/10 and files it as an intra-Africa + Gulf hub transit corridor.

Dar es Salaam to Nairobi is one of the busiest short-haul links in East Africa, connecting Tanzania with Kenya, with around 14 flights a week. The route carries business travellers, traders, tourists and passengers connecting onward. Block time is about an hour and a half.

Great-circle distance Dar es Salaam–Nairobi is about 668 km, computed from the stored coordinates of DAR (-6.88, 39.20) and NBO (-1.32, 36.93). What the figure fixes is the sector profile — 668 km against a scheduled 1.5-hour block time — and the fuel-and-crew economics behind the fare floor. It does not fix a compensation amount. No fixed-tariff compensation scheme reaches DAR–NBO. EU261 and UK261 do band by distance, but they only cover flights departing an EU/EEA or UK airport — plus arrivals there on a bloc-licensed carrier — and neither endpoint here is one, whoever operates the flight. The Montreal Convention 1999 is what applies, and it pays provable loss, not a tariff.

Airlines on this route

1 carrier operates DAR–NBO: Kenya Airways (KQ), a full-service airline based in Kenya, a member of SkyTeam, with a 23 kg checked-baggage baseline in our table. Our route file puts the corridor at about 14 weekly departures with a scheduled block time near 1.5 hours.

Kenya Airways operates DAR-NBO, flying the short regional sector direct to Nairobi. Nairobi is the carrier’s main hub, so the route is also a feeder into a wide network of connections across Africa and beyond.

Our carrier table records a diaspora / migrant-worker baggage uplift of +5 kg on Kenya Airways. Read that as a carrier promotion, not a universal entitlement: uplifts of this kind are normally tied to specific fare families and specific corridors, they are rarely honoured on a codeshare or interline segment issued by another airline, and the cheapest promotional fare buckets are the ones most often excluded. Confirm the allowance against your own booking class before you pack to it.

USD fares — DAR-NBO

$275 is the most recent weekly reading in our fare log for DAR–NBO, taken in 2026-W29, across 6 readings that range $150 to $275. The point-in-time fare cache holds no entry for this corridor, so the weekly log is the observed evidence here.

DAR-NBO fares stay moderate for most of the year, helped by the short distance and steady demand, and rise around the December holidays. Two to four weeks of lead time usually secures a reasonable economy fare in USD.

Book 4-8 weeks ahead. Fares rise around the December holidays; mid-week departures are usually the cheapest. That window is cluster guidance for an intra-Africa + Gulf hub transit corridor rather than a rule for this single pairing; on a corridor with 14 weekly departures, the practical constraint is often seat availability on the days you can actually travel, not the headline fare.

Treat every cached figure on DAR–NBO as a fare, not as a trip cost. What the cache cannot see is the booking class behind the number: checked baggage, seat selection and change rights are all fare-family attributes, and the buckets that produce record-low quotes are the ones that include least. Price the trip you are actually taking.

DAR–NBO fare history — 2026-W20 to 2026-W29

6 weekly readings between 2026-W20 and 2026-W29 put the cached DAR–NBO low between $150 and $275 — a $125 spread, 83% of the cheapest reading. The low landed in 2026-W25; the most recent reading, 2026-W29, was $275. Each row is one weekly snapshot of the cheapest published quote, not an average of everything sold that week.

The cached low rose 5% between the first and last reading, from $263 to $275. Read it with the sample size in front of you: 6 observations over a ten-week window is a signal about this corridor’s volatility, not a forecast. What it does establish is a defensible floor — you now know $150 was achievable on DAR–NBO inside the window, so a quote well above $275 is worth a second search.

Each row is a single weekly snapshot of the cheapest published quote, taken on one day, not an average of everything sold that week. Two consequences follow. A one-week dip can be a single small fare bucket rather than a trend, and a gap between weeks means we did not sample, not that fares vanished. Our history file covers 161 corridors on this pattern, which is what makes cross-corridor comparison possible at all.

Do you need a visa to fly DAR–NBO?

1 entry route applies to most African passports for Kenya: eTA (electronic Travel Authorisation) — replaced visa-on-arrival in January 2024. Fee $30 USD; maximum stay Up to 90 days as decided at port of entry. That row is compiled on a South African (ZA) passport and was verified 2026-05-18, so check it against your own passport on the linked government portal before booking.

Worth knowing before you book: EAC nationals (Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, DRC) enter free. Apply at least 3 days before travel.

The trap on DAR–NBO is not usually the destination visa — it is the transit. A connection can put you airside in a third country that requires a transit visa for your nationality even though you never leave the terminal, and airlines deny boarding at origin when documentation for the whole itinerary is not in order. Check every country your ticket touches, not just Kenya, and check it against your own passport rather than a fellow traveller’s.

Search live fares

14 weekly departures across 1 carrier mean a live DAR–NBO search returns several price points for the same day; the most recent weekly reading in our fare log was $275. Scheduled nonstop block time is 1.5 hours, so any result far above that is connecting whatever the screen says.

Search DAR -> NBO on Aviasales ->

Comparing DAR–NBO quotes fairly takes three corrections. Passenger count and cabin have to match across the tabs you are comparing. Elapsed time has to be read beside the price, since a connection can add most of a day to the 1.5-hour nonstop. And the baggage line has to be checked, because the cheapest fare family is usually the one carrying the least.

Date flexibility beats every other lever on DAR–NBO. Month-scanning surfaces the seasonal shape our fare log records; repeated searching on one fixed date mostly surfaces the same fare bucket. When the calendar is not negotiable — pilgrimage, school holidays, a job start — the useful move is to buy sooner, because scarcity, not timing, is what sets the price then.

About Nairobi

6 catalogued corridors in this site’s data reach Nairobi (NBO), Jomo Kenyatta International, ICAO HKJK, from 6 catalogued origins and 5 carriers in total. That count is this site’s coverage of Nairobi, not the airport’s published schedule. Each of those corridors has its own guide with carriers, weekly frequency, scheduled block time and whatever the fare cache holds.

Nairobi is the capital of Kenya and one of the main economic and transport centres of East Africa. For travellers from Dar es Salaam it is a business and trade destination and a major hub for onward connections across the continent.

Beyond DAR, our catalogue reaches Nairobi from 5 other origins: Cairo (CAI), Entebbe (EBB), Johannesburg (JNB), Kigali (KGL) and Lagos (LOS). That matters when the DAR–NBO fare is unattractive: on a continent where positioning flights are cheap, flying out of a different gateway is a real option, and each of those corridors has its own guide, carriers and cached fare floor on this site.

Nairobi is a based hub for Kenya Airways. A hub airport behaves differently from an outstation: connecting banks are built around it, spare aircraft and crew sit there, and a disruption is far more likely to be recovered the same day. It also means the hub carrier usually sets the price on routes into NBO, and competitors price against it rather than the other way round.

FAQ

Which airlines fly Dar es Salaam to Nairobi? Direct DAR-NBO flights are operated by Kenya Airways. Compare baggage baseline and alliance in the carrier table above.

How long is the DAR-NBO flight and how often does it run? Block time is about 1.5 hours. The DAR-NBO route runs roughly 14 flights per week across all carriers.

How much does a DAR-NBO flight cost and when is it cheapest? Typical economy fares sit in the $400-900 USD band. Intra-Africa and Gulf-hub transit fares move week-to-week; 4-8 weeks is the typical sweet spot.

What is the checked baggage allowance on DAR-NBO? It varies by carrier and fare class — see the baggage-baseline column in the carrier table above. Full-service carriers usually include 23-30 kg, while low-cost carriers sell it as an add-on. Confirm on the airline’s site before booking.

What currency is used in Nairobi? Nairobi uses USD. Fares in this guide are quoted in USD; budget on-the-ground spending in USD.

Related routes and reading

2 onward links follow for DAR–NBO, derived from shared endpoints, shared carriers and shared audience clusters rather than keyword similarity. The note after each says what that page adds that this one does not. Each corridor entry carries that route’s carriers, estimated weekly frequency, scheduled block time and demand score straight from our route file.

• Dar es Salaam airport (DAR) — Julius Nyerere International, Tanzania: 11 catalogued departure corridors and 2 arrival corridors.
• Nairobi airport (NBO) — Jomo Kenyatta International, Kenya: 19 catalogued departure corridors and 6 arrival corridors.

Internal links on this site are placed from the data, not from a keyword list: a corridor is linked when it shares an origin, a destination, a carrier or an audience cluster with the page you are on. If a link above looks unrelated to your trip, it probably shares a carrier or a hub rather than a destination.

The corridor links are there to be used as alternatives, not as further reading. If the DAR–NBO fare or schedule does not work, a different African gateway to Nairobi is often the better fix — positioning within the continent is cheap relative to the long-haul sector, and the fare gap between two origins to the same destination is regularly wider than the positioning ticket. The catch is that separately issued sectors carry no protection if the first one runs late.