Over 200,000 tourists have visited the Maldives thus far this year, the Tourism Ministry has said.
Statistics released by the Tourism Ministry show 200,871 tourists arrived in the Maldives by March 4th. This is a 41.2 percent decline from the number of tourists who visited the archipelago during the same period last year. 341,689 tourists visited the Maldives during the same period in 2020.
While a daily average 3,188 tourists visited the Maldives during the first four days of March, the daily average for January was 3,460, and 2,972 in February. According to the statistics, tourists spent an average stay of 9.2 days in the Maldives, while the average stay duration was 8.8 days in February.
The most number of tourists have visited the Maldives from India thus far this year. 46,541 tourists have arrived in the Maldives via four different airlines offering direct flights to the Maldives. The second-most number of arrivals were recorded from Russia, with 42,417 arrivals.
The Maldives closed its borders to tourists in March 2020 as a precautionary measure against COVID-19, and reopened the border later in July. 555,494 tourists arrived in the Maldives since then until the end of the year, which is less than the 800,000 tourist arrivals that the government had estimated for the period. The Maldives government aims to host 1.5 million tourists this year.
