AFCON 2027 Tanzania: A Football Fan's Guide to Safari Season

In June 2027, Tanzania will do something it hasn't done in fifty years: host the Africa Cup of Nations. Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania are running the tournament together — the first time three countries have shared AFCON hosting duties — with matches kicking off on 19 June and running through 17 July. If you're one of the thousands of fans planning to fly in for it, you're sitting on an opportunity most tournament visitors never get: the chance to watch world-class football and go on a proper East African safari in the same trip.

Where the matches are happening

Tanzania's share of the tournament is spread across three very different cities, which is good news if you want to see more of the country than just a stadium and a hotel room:

• Dar es Salaam — the country's largest city, hosting at the 60,000-seat Benjamin Mkapa Stadium.
• Arusha — the safari capital of northern Tanzania, with matches at the newly built Samia Suluhu Hassan Stadium (30,000 seats). This is also the closest AFCON venue to the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater and Kilimanjaro.
• Zanzibar — matches split between Amaan Stadium and the newer Fumba Stadium, both on an island already built around welcoming visitors.

Why Arusha is the one to plan around

If you can only build your trip around one host city, make it Arusha. It's already the town every northern-circuit safari starts and ends from, which means you can watch a match, then be inside Arusha National Park the same afternoon, or on the road to the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater the next morning. A few days of safari before or after a fixture turns a football trip into the kind of holiday you'd have planned anyway — just with a stadium added to the itinerary.

Don't skip Zanzibar

If your matches fall in Zanzibar, you're not missing out — you're getting the easier logistics. Spice farms, Stone Town, and some of the best beaches on the Swahili coast are all a short drive from either stadium, so match days and beach days sit comfortably in the same week. See our Zanzibar travel guide for how to fill the days between kickoffs.

Building the trip

The tournament runs a full month, so most fans aren't there for the whole thing — you're likely flying in for a specific stretch of fixtures. That's actually the easiest kind of trip for us to build a safari around: tell us which city your matches are in and roughly which dates, and we'll build the safari or beach days around them rather than the other way round.

Book early. Hotel rooms in Arusha and Zanzibar fill up fast in a normal high season — an AFCON month will be tighter than usual.

Get in touch and tell us your match dates — we'll build the rest of the trip around them.