The Tourism Ministry’s statistics show that April saw an increase of 36.3% in tourist arrivals compared to the same month last year.

Despite warnings that the terror attacks in Sri Lanka would impact Maldives’ tourism, statistics show that April saw 163,114 tourist arrivals.

163,843 tourist arrivals were recorded in March, which is an increase of 16.8% compared to the same month last year.

In a press conference on Tuesday, Tourism Minister Ali Waheed said that this was the biggest jump in tourist arrivals since the tsunami disaster in 2004 and congratulated all tourism workers and President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih for his policies.

The greatest number of tourists came from Europe, which were 88,031, and the second greatest number of tourists were from Asia, which were 59,390.

7,393 tourists came from the United States, 6,443 from the Middle East, and 1,883 from Africa.

From individual countries, the greatest number of tourists came from China with Italy in second. 95,272 tourists came from China and 67,891 came from Italy.

646,092 tourist arrivals were recorded from January to April.