With 69,730 visitors by the end of the third month of the ongoing year, neighboring India remains the top source market for Maldives tourism.

Latest statistics publicized by the Ministry of Tourism reveal that India remains the top source market for the archipelago nation’s tourism, as the country’s tourist arrivals reached 298,570 by the end of March.

While visitors are staying for an average of eight days, the number of tourist arrivals recorded the same period last year was significantly higher. As such, it was 22 percent more than the over 298,500 visitors recorded this year, with 382,762 visitors having been recorded last year.

Tourism Ministry also shared that an average of 3,317 tourists were visiting the Maldives every day based on their statistics.

Maldives celebrated over 100,000 tourist arrivals during March, the highest monthly arrivals recorded since borders were reopened for international travel. As such, 109,585 tourist visited Maldives during March, which was a significant boost in comparison to the 59,630 arrivals recorded in March 2020.

During January 2021, Maldives welcomed 92,103. The number escalated to 96,882 in the month that followed.

The month of March saw a record number of tourist arrivals at 5,516 last Friday. Arrivals hovered above 5,000 for the next two days and dropped to 3,653 on Monday. 3,275 tourists visited Maldives on Tuesday, followed by 3,091 visitors on the last day of March.

India contributes 23.4 percent of the arrival rate, which is a step up after having been ranked second before the Covid-19 pandemic began sweeping across the globe. India is followed by Russia making up 21.3 percent with 63,523 arrivals by Wednesday and third comes Ukraine, which jumped from the 23rd rank according to pre-Covid stats and currently contributes six percent of tourist arrivals. 17,921 visitors arrived from Ukraine up until Wednesday.

Germany, Kazakhstan, Romania, United States of America, United Kingdom, Czech Republic and France, are also considered some of the biggest tourist markets for the Maldives.

The ministry boasts increasing tourist arrivals, which were snail-paced into the beginning of the country’s tourism-revival journey. As such, an optimistic tourism ministry revealed that the source markets are recovering, with “impressive” results.

With this being said, the average growth rates of arrivals from the Central/Eastern Europe and South Asia had surpassed the pre-Covid rates by the end of March, with individual markets within the Central/Eastern European region excelling as new markets emerge from the region and making the top 10 source markets for Maldives tourism.

The country saw a record-breaking 1.7 million tourist arrivals during 2019 and an optimistic government set a vision to break the record with two million arrivals in 2020, which was foiled by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, due to which authorities halted issuing on-arrival visas on March 27 that year.

Nearly four months later, Maldives tourism began reviving and from July 15, arrivals have been increasing steadily over the past couple of months. Maldives was able to exceed its new target of 545,000, by the end of December 2020 and aims to welcome 1.5 million tourist arrivals this ongoing year.

Maldives will mark 50 years since the tourism industry’s inception, in 2022, which is to be celebrated as the golden year of tourism in Maldives.