Tuesday, January 5, 2021
On Sunday, the government of Maldives disclosed that across the year 2020, a total of 555,399 tourists had come to this small archipelagic state in South Africa.
In the initial three days of January 2021, Maldives welcomed an additional 6165 tourists from countries like Russia, Ukraine, India, the United Kingdom, Kazakistan, France, Slovakia, United States of America, Austria, Germany and many others.
Maldives recorded the arrival of the 100,000th tourist on December 12th after the travel restrictions were removed. Five days after the milestone was reached, the government of Maldives welcomed the year’s 500,000th tourist.
By the end of 2020, the industry surpassed targets set to support the recovery of tourism as well as the numbers projected for 2020.
Maldives recorded 93,823 incoming visitors across the month of December 2020, marking the highest number of tourist arrivals within a month for 2021. November statistics end at less than half the number with 35,000 arrivals in total, highlighting a sharp increase for the following month.
Figures all through the year pinpoint Russia as serving the largest percentage of tourists headed to the archipelago, in general, from any single country, with a recorded total of 46,000 holidaymakers from Russia.
The striking numbers of arrivals were next attributed to India and the United Kingdom, at 27, 667 and 19,686 respectively. A huge amount of A-listers from Bollywood, India’s rich film industry, were seen rushing to their tropical neighbor’s equally popular beaches to revitalize and escape the woes of lockdown.
On July 15th, the island nation reopened its borders to all international passengers, after almost four months since the state stopped issuing on-arrival visas on March 27th. Guesthouses were allowed to resume operations and start local tourism on October 15th.
Even though Maldives observed an important reduction in tourist arrivals compared to pre-COVID statistics, there has been a steady rise with the establishment of travel bubbles between the country and other nations, as well as greater connectivity in terms of flight operations.
Tags: maldives
