Zanzibar Tourism Statistics

Arrivals

How many visitors Zanzibar counts each year

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The Office of the Chief Government Statistician Zanzibar (OCGS) publishes Zanzibar’s arrivals count, month by month and for the year. Its totals are below, each with the document and the place in it. The newest month we found is October 2026: 86,244 visitors, down 0.6 percent from 86,740 in October 2025.

Latest month: Tourism Statistical Release October 2026 (issued 10 November 2026), Page 1 text; Annex II. Figures read in the PDFs on 2026-11-12. The OCGS website answers on plain http only, so these links start with http.

Do not put these totals next to the survey’s numbers as if they measured the same thing. They do not match: the National Bureau of Statistics’ 2025 report gives 654,880 tourist arrivals in Zanzibar for 2025 and 601,006 for 2024, against OCGS totals of 917,167 and 736,755. OCGS counts the international visitors it records entering Zanzibar at the airport and the seaport, and its 2024 release shows that this includes 54,217 visitors who arrived by domestic flight and 84,056 by ferry from the Tanzanian mainland (Table 2). We have not reconciled the two counts and do not claim to know every difference in how they are made. The National Bureau of Statistics figures here are from its 2025 report, Section 2.16, Tourism Earnings.

Source countries

Where Zanzibar’s visitors come from

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The survey asks departing visitors which country they come from. For Zanzibar in 2023, the six largest were these. The percentages are shares of the visitors surveyed, not headcounts.

The survey adds that the 15 largest countries made up about 78% of visitors to Zanzibar, and that Italy regained first place after losing it in 2016. Germany, France and the United Kingdom followed. Among visitors from African countries, it names Ethiopia and Kenya as the largest groups and ties this to more daily flights from both.

Why this ranking differs from the arrivals count above. For 2023 the OCGS arrivals release puts French first (68,079 visitors, 10.7 percent) and Italian second (67,584, 10.6 percent), while the survey puts Italy first. The two measure different things: OCGS counts visitors recorded entering Zanzibar across the whole year, while the survey interviews a sample of departing visitors over about two weeks (28 August to 10 September 2023), and reports shares of those interviewed.

One thing to watch if you compare years. The survey prints a chart for 2022 beside the one for 2023, and its text says in one place that Italy regained first position and in another that France had led for the past three years. We have therefore not built a year-on-year ranking here. If you need one, read chart 2.3 in the original and decide for yourself which statement you trust.

Stay and spend

How long visitors stay and what they spend

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The survey reports a shorter stay in Zanzibar than on the mainland: 6 nights on average in 2023, against 10 nights for Tanzania as a whole. That is one night shorter than in 2022. Zanzibar visitors spent more per night, though: USD 257 per person, against USD 250 across Tanzania. A shorter stay at a higher nightly spend might fit an island that people add to the end of a safari or visit for a beach week, but the survey does not say that, and we do not claim it.

Spending in the survey is what visitors say they spent in the country on the trip, per night. It covers accommodation, food, transfers and activities. It is an average across every kind of trip, so it cannot tell you what a visitor to any one hotel pays, and it should not be used as a room-rate benchmark.

For the country as a whole, the survey puts international tourism earnings at USD 3,373.8 million in 2023, from 1,808,205 international visitor arrivals. Those two numbers are national. They are often quoted as if they were Zanzibar’s, and they are not.

Newer edition

Headline figures from the 2025 edition of the survey

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The National Bureau of Statistics lists its The 2025 International Visitors’ Exit Survey Report as published on 1 July 2026 (25th cycle of the exit survey, covering 2025). We read its executive summary on 2026-11-12. The figures below are the ones it states in words for Zanzibar and for Tanzania; we have not rebuilt the detailed tables above on this edition.

Source: National Bureau of Statistics, Tanzania, The 2025 International Visitors’ Exit Survey Report; listed on the tourism statistics page of the National Bureau of Statistics.

Citing and updating

How to cite this page, and how it is kept current

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Please cite the original. A short form that works: “National Bureau of Statistics, Tanzania, The 2023 International Visitors’ Exit Survey Report, chart or section as named in the table, read on 2026-11-12 via hotelmatlai.com.” If you would like to quote a figure and want to check how we read it, write to us and we will point you to the page of the PDF.

Each figure in the table is stored with the chart or section that states it. When the National Bureau of Statistics releases the next survey, the figures on this page are replaced together, not one at a time, and the “read on” date changes with them. The main table is on the 2023 edition and the headline block is on the 2025 edition, published on 1 July 2026. For anything newer, the publishers’ own sites are the place to look first: the National Bureau of Statistics tourism page and the Office of the Chief Government Statistician Zanzibar (plain http; its https address does not open).

This page is part of our Zanzibar travel guide. If you are planning a trip rather than writing about one, these pages answer the practical questions: the guide to the best time to visit Zanzibar, the page on flights to Zanzibar and the visa and insurance requirements.