Flights Dar es Salaam -> Istanbul (DAR-IST) — USD Fares, Airlines, Frequency
5 scheduled departures a week link Dar es Salaam (DAR) in Tanzania with Istanbul (IST) — one every 1.4 days on average — flown by 1 catalogued carrier at a scheduled block time near 8.0 hours.
Dar es Salaam to Istanbul connects Tanzania with Turkey, with around 5 flights a week. The route carries business travellers, traders, tourists and passengers connecting onward across Europe and Asia. Block time is about eight hours.
Great-circle distance Dar es Salaam–Istanbul is about 5,460 km, computed from the stored coordinates of DAR (-6.88, 39.20) and IST (41.28, 28.75). What the figure fixes is the sector profile — 5,460 km against a scheduled 8.0-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–IST. 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–IST: Turkish Airlines (TK), a full-service airline based in Turkey, a member of Star Alliance, with a 30 kg checked-baggage baseline in our table. We estimate about 5 weekly departures on the corridor, with a scheduled block time near 8.0 hours.
Turkish Airlines operates DAR-IST, flying a full-service widebody direct to Istanbul with a checked baggage allowance and meals included. Istanbul is the carrier’s main hub, with one of the widest route networks in the world for onward connections.
| Carrier | Baggage baseline | Alliance |
|---|---|---|
| Turkish Airlines (TK) | 30 kg | Star Alliance |
Our carrier table records a diaspora / migrant-worker baggage uplift of +25 kg on Turkish Airlines. 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-IST
$770 was the 2026-W29 reading in our weekly fare log for DAR–IST, across 6 readings that range $751 to $829.
DAR-IST fares climb around the summer and the December holidays. For those dates, booking two to three months ahead is sensible. Outside the peaks, five to eight weeks usually secures a reasonable economy fare in USD.
Book 4-8 weeks ahead. Business demand keeps fares higher mid-week and around the December holidays. That window is general guidance rather than a rule for this single pairing; on a corridor with 5 weekly departures, the practical constraint is often seat availability on the days you can actually travel, not the headline fare.
One thing our fare data cannot tell you: whether the quote includes a checked bag. The cache stores a price and a carrier, not a fare family. On DAR–IST that matters most where a low-cost carrier or a basic-economy bucket is in the mix, because the cheapest screen number and the cheapest all-in number are then two different itineraries. Compare after adding the bag you will actually carry.
Has the DAR–IST fare moved? 6 weekly readings
6 weekly readings between 2026-W20 and 2026-W29 put the cached DAR–IST low between $751 and $829 — a $78 spread, 10% of the cheapest reading. The low landed in 2026-W20; the last reading in this table, 2026-W29, was $770. Each row is one weekly snapshot of the cheapest published quote, not an average of everything sold that week.
| ISO week | Cached low (USD) | Carrier on the quote |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-W20 | $751 | FZ |
| 2026-W23 | $755 | QR |
| 2026-W24 | $829 | FZ |
| 2026-W25 | $789 | FZ |
| 2026-W27 | $816 | FZ |
| 2026-W29 | $770 | FZ |
The cached low was effectively flat end to end — $751 at the start of the window against $770 at the end. 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 $751 was achievable on DAR–IST inside the window, so a quote well above $829 is worth a second search.
Carriers behind the readings: FZ and QR, with the $751 low attributed to FZ. Where a row shows a dash the gate returned no carrier code with the quote, which usually means a multi-carrier or agency-issued itinerary. Do not read a carrier name here as that airline’s own published fare — it is the marketing carrier on the cheapest itinerary a gate had loaded that week.
Do you need a visa to fly DAR–IST?
Entry rule for Turkey, by passport: Depends on passport. South African passports need a visa — a one-month single-entry e-Visa is available at evisa.gov.tr; Namibian passports can use the e-Visa; Nigerian, Kenyan, Ghanaian and Botswanan passports are listed as visa required. Fee Varies by nationality — shown on evisa.gov.tr; maximum stay One month on the South African single-entry e-Visa. That row names the passports it covers; for any other passport, check the linked government portal before booking.
| Entry type | Fee | Maximum stay | Official source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Depends on passport. South African passports need a visa — a one-month single-entry e-Visa is available at evisa.gov.tr; Namibian passports can use the e-Visa; Nigerian, Kenyan, Ghanaian and Botswanan passports are listed as visa required | Varies by nationality — shown on evisa.gov.tr | One month on the South African single-entry e-Visa | Turkey official source |
Worth knowing before you book: Print a copy of any e-Visa for check-in.
Read the row above against your own passport. It names the nationalities it covers, and an ECOWAS, EAC or Maghreb passport not named there can face a different fee, a different processing route or no eligibility at all for the same destination. Entry rules change without notice, so the linked government portal is the authority, not this table.
Search live fares
5 weekly departures across 1 carrier mean a live DAR–IST search returns several price points for the same day; our weekly fare log has recorded readings as low as $770 (see the dated history on this page). Scheduled nonstop block time is 8.0 hours, so any result far above that is connecting whatever the screen says.
Search DAR -> IST on Aviasales ->
A live DAR–IST search is only comparable once three things are pinned: the cabin and passenger count, so totals are like for like; the elapsed time, which separates a genuine nonstop from a routing that merely costs the same; and the baggage the fare includes. Skip any of the three and you are comparing two different products.
Date flexibility beats every other lever on DAR–IST. 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 Istanbul
3 catalogued corridors in this site’s data reach Istanbul (IST), Istanbul Airport, ICAO LTFM, from 3 catalogued origins and 3 carriers in total. That count is this site’s coverage of Istanbul, 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.
Istanbul is Turkey’s largest city, spanning the Bosphorus between Europe and Asia, with a long history visible in its mosques, palaces and markets. For travellers from Dar es Salaam it is a tourist and trade destination and a major connecting point for Europe and Asia.
Beyond DAR, our catalogue reaches Istanbul from 2 other origins: Cairo (CAI) and Casablanca (CMN). That matters when the DAR–IST 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.
Istanbul is a based hub for Turkish Airlines. 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 IST, and competitors price against it rather than the other way round.
FAQ
Which airlines fly Dar es Salaam to Istanbul? Direct DAR-IST flights are operated by Turkish Airlines. Compare baggage baseline and alliance in the carrier table above.
How long is the DAR-IST flight and how often does it run? Block time is about 8.0 hours. The DAR-IST route runs roughly 5 flights per week across all carriers.
How much does a DAR-IST flight cost and when is it cheapest? Our rough planning range is $500-1,500 USD (an editorial estimate, not an observed fare); the fare observation on this page shows what our weekly snapshot recorded and when. Business inbound and India-Africa corridors reward 6-10 weeks of lead time.
What is the checked baggage allowance on DAR-IST? 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 Istanbul? Istanbul uses USD. Fares in this guide are quoted in USD; budget on-the-ground spending in USD.
Related routes and reading
- Dar es Salaam airport (DAR) — Julius Nyerere International, Tanzania: 11 catalogued departure corridors and 2 arrival corridors.
- Istanbul airport (IST) — Istanbul Airport, Turkey: 0 catalogued departure corridors and 3 arrival corridors.
The airport guides carry what a corridor page cannot: the full catalogued route list at each end, the based hub carriers, the alliance mix and the compensation regime of the country that airport sits in. On a connecting itinerary the transfer airport’s rules matter as much as the destination’s, which is why DAR–IST links both ends rather than only the arrival.