Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - Flights to Dar es Salam

jules39,
Where are you flying from? I just priced LAX-DAR with random weekday dates in Sep and came up with $1785 on BA. This is an M class economy fare valid for the following seasons - 3APR-29MAY, 1SEP-26OCT OR 16-23DEC. The reason that you're coming up with $3000 may be that M class fares are sold out on the particular dates that you checked.

Try shifting your dates around some more, keeping in mind that service on BA from LHR to DAR only operates 3x per week. It's Mo/Th/Sa southbound and Tu/Fr/Su northbound.

This is currently the lowest published fare. The KLM fare (a Q class fare valid 25DEC-31MAY OR 2SEP-15DEC) is about $100 higher but they do offer the advantage of flying daily into DAR from AMS (the southbound flight makes a brief stop at JRO to drop off passengers).

Try using this site to check fares:

http://www.flyaow.com/classcwt.htm

It displays the fare class or fare 'bucket' information so you can easily see if a particular fare, i.e. an M fare, is available before selecting and pricing your flights. Look under the Notes section and it will show a string of letters and numbers like this:

Cabin class: F9 A9 J9 C9 D9 I0 Y9 B9 H9 K9 M9 R9 V9 N0 0 0

The letters represent various fare buckets within each class of service, for example F and A are first class fare buckets, Y and all the letters appearing after Y are economy class buckets. Y represents the full undiscounted economy fare, B/H/K/M/R/V/N are all various discounted economy fares. The number after each letter shows how many seats are still left within that particular fare bucket with 9 being the maximum that this system displays (in other words there could be well over 9 seats left). If you see a zero after the letter that means that there are no more seats for sale in that fare bucket.

Each airline uses it's own particular set of letters. There are similarities between all the airlines, for example F is always first class, J is always business and Y is always economy, but an M fare on BA will not be the same as a M fare on another carrier (the above string was copied from a BA flight). In addition, there are slight price variances within each fare bucket, for example a weekday M fare may not be the same as a weekend M fare. When I changed my weekday dates to Sunday (both departing and returning), the fare came to around $2000 on BA. Both were M fares but the difference in price was the result of the day of travel.

Sorry to ramble on, does this make any sense or is it all gobblygook (I can never tell when I'm writing these things)?

Finally, check some of the consolidators that offer air to Africa. They may have access to fares that are even lower than the lowest published fares. There have been a few names mentioned on this board. I know that here in LA, Somak Safaris advertises their fares in the travel section of the LA Times every week.

Good luck!