Reunion Island witnesses record visitors in 2018

Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Reunion Island welcomed record 574,000 outside visitors despite a difficult end to the year 2018. This is a rise of 4.1 per cent over the fiscal 2017. In 2018, 35 ships and 39,433 cruise passengers landed on the island. The revenue amounted to more than 432 million euros and is still increasing.

Reunion Island’s neighbors in the Indian Ocean remain fond of the destination. There were over 60,000 tourists from the Indian Ocean in 2018 after a spectacular increase of 46 per cent recorded in 2017. Within this Indian Ocean zone, Mauritius remains the main source market since it represents more than 30,000 tourists, or 5.8 per cent of total arrivals to Reunion.

The leisure clientele represents an overwhelming majority of arriving visitors with 90.8 per cent of the overall volume of arrivals on the island while that of business tourism is 8.5 per cent.

There was communication and promotion focusing on the main European markets, other than France which was very fruitful. This visitor source market now accounts for 7.4 per cent of total arrivals, compared to 6 per cent in 2017. In total, 39,664 visitors came from the rest of Europe in 2018 which is 4.2 per cent more than 2017.

The average length of stay of these foreign tourists is 17 days and remains unchanged compared to 2017, a figure particularly important for a long-haul destination such as Reunion.

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