Why this page exists
Most travel and investment sites answer every question. That is the tell.
Some things about Zanzibar are genuinely not published anywhere you can check. The honest response is to say so and show the search — not to round a plausible number up to a fact and let it circulate. Every entry below is a question we went looking for, could not close, and will not answer until we can.
We publish this for a practical reason as much as a principled one. If you are booking a trip or committing capital, the open questions are the ones that cost you money. A site that hides them leaves you to discover them yourself, later, at your own expense.
Every claim on this page is a negative one — that something is not published, not stated, or not traceable. Negative claims are harder to prove than positive ones, so each entry says exactly what we checked and where. If you can close one of these, the WhatsApp button on any page reaches a human, and the answer goes on the page with your name on it if you want it there.
How to read this register
Each open question sits in one of three states, and they are not the same thing:
- Not published anywhere. We have looked at the primary source and the fact is not in it. More searching will not help; someone has to be asked directly.
- Waiting on a person. The answer exists and is obtainable, but only from a named body or a qualified professional — a government office, an insurer, an accountant, counsel.
- Genuinely contested. Credible sources disagree, or one source contradicts itself, and we cannot tell which is right.
We do not treat “widely repeated online” as evidence in any of the three. Several entries below exist precisely because a number is repeated everywhere and traceable to nothing.
Money and tax
What the mandatory Zanzibar travel insurance actually costs
State: waiting on a person.
The insurance is real and it is compulsory: the official inbound portal confirms it is mandatory and that the Zanzibar Insurance Corporation is the sole authorised provider. What the portal will not do is show you the tariff. The price appears only once you begin an application — and we will not start one, because that creates a real application record against a traveller who does not exist.
Multiple independent secondary sources agree on USD 44 per adult for 92 days, USD 22 for ages 3–17, and free under 3. That agreement is suggestive and it is not proof, so those figures carry needs-recheck in our ledger and no page presents them as settled.
One thing we can already correct: the charge is levied in US dollars, not rupees. Our own early seed data stated it in INR, which was wrong — any rupee figure is a conversion, and a conversion has to be published with its exchange rate and its date or it is not a fact.
Who can close it: the Zanzibar Insurance Corporation, in writing. That request is open.
India’s TCS on overseas tour packages
State: waiting on a person — specifically a chartered accountant.
This is the single most consequential number for a traveller booking from India, and it is the one we have checked least, on purpose. Tax rates that are tiered, that changed recently, and that depend on how a booking is structured are not something to establish from search results. Our ledger row carries no source and no checked date, and it is marked as requiring a chartered accountant.
What we will not do: publish a rate, a threshold or a “roughly 20%” while it is in this state. The India money guide is written and is not published for this reason alone.
Who can close it: a practising chartered accountant, engaged for the purpose. Not a search result, and not us.
Property, law and investment
Everything in this section was read from the signed instruments themselves — the Zanzibar Investment Act No. 10 of 2023, the Land Tenure Act 1992, the Zanzibar Condominium Act 2010. These are open questions after reading the law, not instead of it.
How long the investor residence permit lasts
State: not published anywhere we can find.
The Investment Act provides that a buyer of property worth USD 100,000 or more in an approved real-estate project may be granted residence permits for themselves, a spouse and four children under twenty. It says nothing whatsoever about how long the permit lasts.
“Two years, renewable while the property is held” appears on agency site after agency site. We have found no official source for it at all. We are not saying it is wrong; we are saying nobody has shown us where it comes from.
Who can close it: ZIPA or the immigration authority, in writing.
Whether a 33-year investment lease can reach 99 years
State: genuinely contested — and this one caught us out.
The Investment Act’s Fifth Schedule fixes the land lease for real-estate developers in approved projects at 33 years, and says nothing about renewal. Virtually every agency site says “33 years, renewable up to 99”.
We originally published the negative: that renewability was not in the law. That was too strong, and we corrected it. Our negative covered the 2023 Act only, and a follow-through read of the Land Tenure Act 1992 found section 47(2) within a day: “Notwithstanding the provision of sub-section (1) leases of public land may be renewed.” Renewal of public-land leases is statutory. It is not an agency invention.
What no instrument we have read states: a 99-year total, or how the 1992 renewal power applies to a lease granted under the 2023 Act. Both remain open.
Who can close it: counsel qualified in Zanzibari law.
Where the “USD 300,000 minimum for foreigners” came from
State: genuinely contested.
The figure is everywhere, including on an official-looking regulatory portal. It is not a threshold in the current Act — that much is settled, because we read the Second Schedule and the four numbers in it are different ones.
The obvious explanation is that it survives from the pre-2023 regime, which section 62(1) repealed. But nobody has read the 2018 Act’s own schedule, including us, so we do not state that as fact. Our verified claim is the narrow one: not in the current Act. The unverified claim is: was the 2018 threshold.
Which law governs the resale of a unit
State: genuinely contested, and it is a counsel question rather than a research one.
Three instruments point different ways. The Land Tenure Act 1992 says leases of public land “shall not be sold, assigned, sub-leased or sub-divided but shall be inheritable” (s.47(3)). The Condominium Act 2010 lets a unit-owner transfer to any other person (s.16(1)(b)). The Investment Act 2023 provides a transfer route for an Approved Investment, with written ZIPA approval first (s.55).
Which of these governs the resale of a particular unit is exactly the question a developer’s resale promise depends on, and we will not guess at it.
Whether ZIPA regulates the zone you are buying in
State: not published in any form we have read.
A finding worth knowing, because the marketing shorthand is wrong in an interesting way. The President designates a Special Economic Zone by notice in the Gazette, and that same notice defines the zone’s regulators — “whether public or private” (s.39(2)). ZIPA’s “exclusive regulatory jurisdiction” over zones is expressly subject to that exception (s.39(3)).
So “ZIPA regulates the SEZs” is the default position, not a guarantee. Which body regulates a specific zone is a per-notice question — and we have not read the Gazette notice for any individual named zone, Fumba included.
Who can close it: the Gazette notices themselves, if they can be obtained.
Getting around
What a shared airport shuttle costs
State: not published as a rate.
We publish the two operators who put a fixed per-vehicle rate card in public, because those can be checked. Several sources quote USD 10–20 per person for a shared shuttle, and none of them publishes it as a rate-card entry. An indicative range from a third party is not a price, so it is not on our transfer page.
Whether anyone charges a night surcharge
State: a bounded negative — read the boundary carefully.
Neither operator with a published fixed rate card has a night band at all: their quoted rate is the rate whatever time you land. That is what we publish, and it is all it means.
It does not mean no operator in Zanzibar charges one. One source says “some companies” add USD 5–10 after 22:00, but generically and about other firms, with a range rather than a rate card. A separate lead of “+USD 10, 23:00–06:30” could not be traced to any operator’s own page, so it is not published.
Where Bolt actually operates, and for how much
State: not published.
Bolt lists Zanzibar among its Tanzania cities on its own site; Uber’s own global city list has no Tanzania entry and its Zanzibar city URLs return 404. Note that those two halves are not equally strong: one is a positive listing, the other is an absence plus two dead links, and a company can restructure URLs. So we publish what each company’s own site does and does not list, dated — not the flat claim that Uber does not operate here.
Unverified and therefore absent: Bolt’s actual coverage area, whether drivers take airport pickups, and what a typical fare is.
Sea, tides and weather
Paje’s own tidal range
State: not published.
The nearest peer-reviewed measurement on the same coast is Chwaka Bay — mean spring range about 3.2 m, neap about 0.9 m, with more than 60% of the bay exposed at lowest spring tide. That is Chwaka Bay, not Paje, and the Paje guide says so rather than presenting it as Paje’s own figure. A Paje-specific measurement remains unsourced.
Nungwi’s tidal range, and how much smaller it really is
State: not published — and this one is ours to be careful about.
Every guide to Zanzibar, ours included, tells you the north tip barely has a tide while the south-east coast has a large one. The practical difference is real enough that it decides which beach suits you, and our Nungwi guide is built around it.
What we do not have is a measurement. We hold a peer-reviewed spring and neap range for Chwaka Bay on the east coast, and nothing comparable for Nungwi or anywhere on the north tip. So “barely a tide” is, on our own evidence, a widely repeated qualitative claim rather than a sourced number, and we are not going to attach a figure to it because one would read better.
Who can close it: a published hydrographic or peer-reviewed measurement for the north coast, or the Tanzania Meteorological Authority. Until then the comparison is stated as a difference in kind, not in centimetres.
A free official tide table for Zanzibar
State: none exists, as far as we can establish.
The UK Hydrographic Office’s free service covers British Isles ports only. The UNESCO IOC Zanzibar station reports observed sea level rather than predictions, and was down when we checked.
The consequence for you: every Paje tide table online is a commercial prediction, usually with no stated datum. At least one popular site files a different Paje — the one in the Comoros. Check which Paje you are looking at before you plan a boat day around it.
Monthly rainfall from an official source
State: genuinely contested, and newly so.
Our month-by-month tables use a secondary aggregation of 1992–2021 records for one station area. We tried to re-base them on an authority and could not, in an instructive way.
The Tanzania Meteorological Authority publishes no free monthly normals for Zanzibar or Kisauni. The WMO’s World Weather Information Service does carry a Zanzibar table supplied by the Tanzania Meteorological Agency for 1971–2000 — and its two halves behave differently. The temperatures corroborate ours: maxima agree within 0.8°C in every month, and minima run 0.1–1.7°C cooler, which is what a thirty-year window ending in 2000 should look like next to one ending in 2021.
The rainfall column cannot be used. It gives April 17 rain days totalling 40.9 mm — about 2.4 mm per rain day, in the middle of the long rains — and its twelve months sum to 172 mm for a year that receives on the order of a thousand. A unit error would explain the factor, but the field expressly says millimetres, and we do not publish a number whose unit we have had to guess.
So our temperature figures have official corroboration and our rainfall figures do not. Both are labelled that way on the page.
Places, suppliers and prices
Whether any hotel’s kitchen actually delivers veg, Jain or halal provision
State: not verified — and the reason our area guides (Nungwi, Paje) have empty “where to stay” sections.
“Vegetarian options available” is asserted by almost every property and verified by almost nobody. We are not interested in the assertion; we want to know what the kitchen does — separate preparation, shared oil, what happens to a Jain request in practice, alcohol policy, distance to a mosque.
No property has passed that check yet. Until one does, those sections stay empty rather than being filled with listings we have not checked. An empty section is information too.
Safari Blue’s 2027 season prices
State: not yet published by the operator.
Our adult and child prices are current and were re-checked at source. The next season’s rates are not out. When they appear, the page changes and the ledger keeps the old reading rather than overwriting it — that is how every price on this site works.
A wedding planner that quotes two different ranges
State: genuinely contested, at a single source.
One Stone Town planner’s homepage states an “$890 to $3,500 all-inclusive” range while its own itemised package list runs $990–2,290. We publish the itemised list, because it is the more specific of the two, and we do not quote the homepage range. We have not been able to establish which is current.
Which marriage law actually governs a Zanzibar wedding
State: genuinely contested — partly answered on 3 August 2026, and the part that remains is the part that matters.
We can now say what Tanzania’s Law of Marriage Act requires, because we read it: twenty-one days’ notice, a public objection window, a dispensation the Registrar-General may grant by licence, four permitted forms of marriage and two witnesses. That is on the wedding page with its sections and date.
What we have not established is whether that Act is what governs a wedding held in Zanzibar. Its own text says a marriage may be contracted “in Tanzania” and lets the Minister appoint “any area of Tanzania” as a registration area, and we found no clause in the sections we read confining it to the Mainland. But Zanzibar runs its own civil registration through the Zanzibar Civil Status Registration Agency, which records marriages and issues the certificate.
Why we could not simply go and check: that agency’s website serves an invalid security certificate. We will not click through a certificate warning to read a source. A source you cannot reach securely is a source you have not read, and an official body’s own site failing that test is worth stating plainly rather than working around.
One thing we can already flag. The published guidance contradicts itself: one law firm’s Zanzibar page says no waiver of the twenty-one days is available, while another page on the same firm’s site describes applying for a special licence when you have less than twenty-one days. The Act plainly provides the power. We do not know how that discretion is exercised in Zanzibar, and neither, apparently, does the internet.
Who can close it: counsel qualified in Zanzibari law, or the agency in writing.
Beach and ceremony permit fees
State: not published anywhere we can find.
Distinct from the marriage law, and often confused with it: a permit to hold a ceremony on a beach is not the same thing as a valid marriage, and a planner saying “it’s all included” has told you about neither. We have found no official Zanzibar source for permit fees at all. Ask your planner to name the permit and the office that issues it.
What we do while a question is open
The rule is the same in every case, and it is the whole point of this page:
- The page ships without the number, with a sentence saying what is missing and why — not with a plausible figure and no source.
- The gap is stated where the reader needs it, on the page they are reading, not only here.
- Our automatic checks refuse to publish anything still carrying an unconfirmed marker, so this is enforced by the pipeline rather than by good intentions.
- When it closes, it closes in public — the fact gets a dated source, and if it turns out we had something wrong, it also gets an entry on corrections.
About this page. We are not investment advisers, lawyers or tax professionals, and nothing here is advice to invest. We publish what official sources say, with the source and the date we read it. Rules change and individual situations differ: verify anything that matters with ZIPA, your own lawyer and your own accountant before money moves.
How this page changes
Entries leave this page when they are answered, and the answer appears on the page it belongs to with its source and date. Entries are added whenever a check comes back empty — which is most weeks, because looking properly produces open questions faster than it produces closed ones.
If this register ever gets shorter without the site getting bigger, we have stopped looking hard enough.
Related: how we price · corrections