Route brief · SHA → ZNZ
Shanghai → Zanzibar
$1,183
round-trip · too little price history on this route to compare
Sep 17 – Sep 18 · 1 night
Thai Vietjet Air3 stops
Cached fare — the booking search re-prices live before you pay.
Destination briefZNZZanzibarStone Town’s carved doors and spice markets, then white sand on the east coast — often bolted onto a safari.Best windowJun–OctAirportsAbeid Amani Karume (ZNZ)All routes into ZanzibarWhen this route gets cheap.
Best time to be in Zanzibar: Jun–Oct. Fare history for this route is still thin, so we make no seasonal call yet.
The cheapest itinerary we are tracking makes 3 stops and takes about 17.5 hours outbound, on a 1-night trip — ticketed under Thai Vietjet Air, which on a connecting fare need not operate every leg. At $1,183 for 9,634 km each way, that works out to about $61 per 1,000 km flown. That is above the $44 typical of long-haul fares here. Across the 13 departure cities we track at a similar distance from Zanzibar, this fare ranks 9th — 1.8× the $661 we hold from London. For context, the middle fare among the 41 routes of similar length we watch out of Shanghai is $801. 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.
The 3 days we hold a cached fare for
Tap a date → live search
The median cached fare across this calendar is 7% higher than when tracking began on Aug 8 — $1,105 then versus $1,183 now, across 5 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 $1,021, on Sep 17.
These are the only days we have a cached price for on this route so far — not the only days it flies. The search above covers any date.
Route facts
- Airports
- Pudong (PVG) · Hongqiao (SHA) ↔ Abeid Amani Karume (ZNZ)
- Flight time
- ~17.5 hours outbound
- Distance
- ~9,634 km each way
- Airlines on the board
- Thai Vietjet Air
- Itineraries
- Connections on current fares
- Best months to visit
- Jun–Oct
SHA → ZNZ, answered.
How far in advance should I book SHA → Zanzibar?
We do not publish a number for this, because we cannot measure it yet.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 Shanghai to Zanzibar?
The current cheapest fares involve a connection, ticketed under Thai Vietjet Air. 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 Zanzibar?
Lock the flight first — then compare stays for Sep 17 – Sep 18 · 1 night.
Browse hotels ↗
Missed it?
Cached fares expire. This route has a feed of its own — follow it and the next SHA → ZNZ drop reaches you as soon as we find it.
Follow SHA → ZNZ