Italy’s Neos airline has resumed flight operations to the Maldives.

The Italian airline halted flight operations to the island nation, a popular tropical destination among zealous holidaymakers, due to the looming threats of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Neos Air resumed direct flights to the Maldives via Milan and Rome routes and is scheduled to fly three weekly flights on Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.

The airline will be operating an aircraft with a 350-person capacity for the operations.

Before the pandemic began sweeping across the globe, Neos had been operating flights to the Maldives and had facilitated flights to natives of Italy, stranded in the Maldives when the island nation’s first few Covid-19 cases were confirmed.

This comes a while after Maldives was ditched from Italy’s travel red list and moved up to the green list on September 22.

Italy ranked third in the Maldives top tourism markets by the end of 2019, with 136,343 arrivals recorded. Italy remained in the top five tourism markets of Maldives during 2020 despite the country’s tourism industry taking a major hit due to Covid-19. 46,690 arrivals from Italy were recorded by the end of 2020.

As the country aims to welcome 1.3 million visitors this year, being removed from Italy’s red list will be a major boost to Maldives tourism.