Zanzibar Makes Its Case as the World Travel Awards 2026 Come Ashore

The World Travel Awards Africa Gala Ceremony 2026 is hosted on Zanzibar’s south east coast by Diamonds Bijoux Zanzibar, a five star retreat that opened only in January. The choice of venue says as much about where African hospitality is heading as any trophy handed out on the night. For the South African luxury traveller, it is a useful signal about an island that has quietly outgrown its beach postcard reputation.

The venue is the message

An awards ceremony is never only about the awards. For the travel industry, the choice of host venue works as a form of endorsement, a quiet statement about which destinations are considered ready for the attention of the people who decide where the world stays, flies and invests.

On 28 August, that attention turns to Zanzibar. The World Travel Awards Africa Gala Ceremony 2026 takes place at Diamonds Bijoux Zanzibar, a property that has been receiving guests for barely eight months.

A resort with eight months behind it

There is a certain confidence in handing a continental gala to a resort that new. Diamonds Bijoux opened in January 2026 on the island’s south east coast, an all inclusive five star retreat that leans on Swahili and Arabic influences rather than the imported vocabulary of international resort design. Hand carved detailing and handcrafted furniture run through the property, and its accommodation ranges from suites to villas, including villas with private pools for guests who measure a holiday by how few people they have to see.

That last point is worth pausing on. Privacy has become the most reliable currency in luxury travel, and it is one of the few things a coastal resort can offer that a city hotel cannot easily replicate.

The night itself

The World Travel Awards describes the ceremony as a moment to recognise excellence across the continent’s travel and tourism industry, with winners named in categories spanning hotels, airlines, tour operators and destinations. The evening forms part of the organisation’s 2026 Grand Tour, which moves through the world’s major tourism regions before reaching its Grand Final in Tanzania in December.

Zanzibar is not merely the backdrop. The island appears across several 2026 categories, including Africa’s Leading Beach Destination, while properties along its coastline feature in categories covering beach resorts, boutique resorts, new resorts and romantic resorts.

For Tanzania, hosting both the Africa Gala in August and the Grand Final in December makes this an unusually prominent year on the global tourism calendar. Countries spend considerable effort competing for that kind of visibility. Tanzania has it twice in one year.

A relationship with some history

The 2026 ceremony is the third World Travel Awards event hosted in partnership with Diamonds Resorts. The first was in Zanzibar in 2016, at Diamonds La Gemma dell’Est. In 2024 the ceremony moved to Diamonds Leisure Beach and Golf Resort in Diani Beach, Kenya. Now it returns to the island where the relationship began.

A decade is a long time in hospitality. That the awards have come back to Zanzibar, this time at a property that did not exist in 2016, is a reasonable measure of how much the destination has developed in the interval.

Beyond the safari lodge

The more interesting story sits behind the ceremony rather than inside it.

For years, luxury travel in Africa was understood almost entirely through the safari lodge. Wildlife remains one of the continent’s great tourism assets, and the lodges that built that reputation continue to set standards that the rest of the world studies. But the definition has widened considerably. Private island retreats, coastal resorts, design led urban hotels and contemporary lodges now sit alongside one another in a hospitality landscape that no longer needs to explain itself in European terms.

Zanzibar is a useful example of that shift because it does not have to choose between beach and culture. Stone Town, the spice trade, Swahili architecture, Persian and Portuguese influence and centuries of movement across the Indian Ocean are all part of the same destination as the water and the sand. A resort built on that island has material to work with.

Diamonds Bijoux appears to understand this. Its appeal is presented through design, craft and restraint rather than volume, which reflects a broader change in what affluent travellers actually want. Exclusivity today can mean a private villa above the ocean. It can equally mean an unhurried afternoon somewhere that still feels specific to where you are.

Why South Africa should be paying attention

Zanzibar occupies a familiar place in the South African travel imagination. It sits in the same mental category as Mauritius and the Seychelles for anyone planning a longer break, close enough to feel reachable and different enough to feel like a proper departure.

But the relevance runs deeper than itineraries. South African hospitality, design and food have spent the past decade earning international recognition on their own terms, without softening what makes them local. Cape Town’s restaurant scene, Johannesburg’s design community and the country’s growing confidence in exporting its creative work all belong to the same movement Zanzibar is now demonstrating on the East African coast.

When an international awards body brings its African ceremony to a Zanzibari resort built around Swahili craft, it validates an argument South African brands have been making for years. African luxury does not need to imitate anywhere else to be taken seriously.

What lingers

The most compelling thing about this year’s ceremony is not the guest list or the categories. It is the suggestion that Zanzibar’s next act may have very little to do with becoming the next Maldives.

The island has always been a place shaped by exchange, by what arrived across the ocean and what left again. Its tourism industry is now doing something similar, absorbing international standards without surrendering its own character. That is a harder thing to build than a resort, and considerably harder to copy.

The red carpet lasts a single evening. The positioning it creates has a much longer life.