Route brief · AUH → RIO
Abu Dhabi → Rio de Janeiro
$1,370
round-trip · too little price history on this route to compare
Feb 20 '27 – Mar 4 '27 · 12 nights
Etihad1 stop
Cached fare — the booking search re-prices live before you pay.
Destination briefRIORio de JaneiroBeaches with mountains growing out of them. Fares south swing hard — we catch the dips.Best windowApr–Jun · Sep–OctAirportsGaleão (GIG) · Santos Dumont (SDU)All routes into Rio de JaneiroWhen this route gets cheap.
Best time to be in Rio de Janeiro: Apr–Jun · Sep–Oct. Fare history for this route is still thin, so we make no seasonal call yet.
The cheapest itinerary we are tracking makes one stop and takes about 18.5 hours outbound, on a 12-night trip — ticketed under Etihad, which on a connecting fare need not operate every leg. At $1,370 for 11,758 km each way, that works out to about $58 per 1,000 km flown. That is above the $40 typical of ultra-long-haul fares here. Across the 22 departure cities we track at a similar distance from Rio de Janeiro, this fare ranks 21st — 2.0× the $700 we hold from Los Angeles. For context, the middle fare among the 19 routes of similar length we watch out of Abu Dhabi is $1,281. We have 3 months of cached prices for this route so far — not enough to call a fare cheap or expensive, so we publish the price without a percentage.
Day-level prices for the next 3 months
Tap any day → live search
The median cached fare across this calendar is 8% lower than when tracking began on Aug 8 — $1,511 then versus $1,396 now, across 6 recorded snapshots. This is a calendar-level trend, so an individual deal above can be lower. The lowest single day we have seen here is $1,135, on Nov 24.
Cached day-level data for this route is sparse — 10 of 93 days priced, from 21 tracked fares. The days below are shown as found, with no cheapest-day or below-median call.
October 2026
Route facts
- Airports
- Zayed International (AUH) ↔ Galeão (GIG) · Santos Dumont (SDU)
- Flight time
- ~18.5 hours outbound
- Distance
- ~11,758 km each way
- Airlines on the board
- Etihad
- Itineraries
- Connections on current fares
- Best months to visit
- Apr–Jun · Sep–Oct
AUH → RIO, answered.
How far in advance should I book AUH → Rio de Janeiro?
We do not publish a number for this, because we cannot measure it yet. Answering it honestly means watching the same departure date on this route over many weeks as it approaches, and that archive is still filling up — so any "book N days ahead" figure here would be borrowed from somewhere else rather than measured. See /guides/what-moves-a-flight-price/ for the levers we can measure.
Are there nonstop flights from Abu Dhabi to Rio de Janeiro?
The current cheapest fares involve a connection, ticketed under Etihad. Nonstop options exist on many dates at higher prices — check the live search for your exact dates.
Are these prices guaranteed?
No — these are cached fares found on real searches (this one on September 1). Airlines reprice constantly, so the booking search re-checks the live price before you pay. Fresher finds are far more likely to still be available.
Next step
Sleeping in Rio de Janeiro?
Lock the flight first — then compare stays for Feb 20 '27 – Mar 4 '27 · 12 nights.
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Missed it?
Cached fares expire. This route has a feed of its own — follow it and the next AUH → RIO drop reaches you as soon as we find it.
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