Over 40,000 tourists are expected to visit the Maldives within the last 10 days of the December.

Minister of Tourism, Dr. Abdulla Mausoom, revealed this while speaking on RaajjeTV’s Fala Surukhee programme on Sunday night.

While the country made a two million target for 2020 following last year’s record breaking 1.7 million tourist arrivals, the target was reduced to 500,000 due to the Covid-19 pandemic which led to a nearly four-month standstill on the tourism industry with the country’s borders closed.

The archipelago nation reached this target last Thursday.

The tourism minister announced the government’s new target for tourist arrivals for 2020, 545,000 visitors during Sunday’s interview, adding that chances of achieving this are “very high”.

He said that industry stakeholders and partners are working tirelessly to ensure that the country reaches this target and noted challenges to this, including “overbooking”.

Further noting that there are reports of some European nations halting flight operations as the Covid-19 situation intensifies in their respective nations, the minister said that they do not expect this to affect Maldives' tourism industry. He stressed that additional flights are scheduled to restart flights to the country within the next few days as well.

While the island nation did not see the expected numbers in arrivals immediately after border reopening in July, visitors have been increasing every month since. The country closed borders on March 27.

1,701 arrivals were recorded during the first 15 days after border reopening, while August saw 7,628 arrivals. 9,538 tourists visited the island nation in September, 21,515 in October as well as 35,759 in November.

According to the ministry’s statistics, arrivals within the first 18 days of December exceeded the previous month; 46,104 tourist arrivals were recorded between 1-18 December with a daily average of 2,561 visitors.

While the country reached the 500,000th visitor milestone last Thursday, the 100,000th tourist since border reopening arrived on December 12.