The Maldives is looking to promote travel to differently-abled people and other niche traveller segments as it continues to rebuild tourism.
Speaking at a press conference this week that coincided with the UNWTO Global Summit on Community-based tourism and the golden jubilee celebration of tourism in the Maldives, tourism minister Abdulla Mausoom said: “We are expanding our markets and not relying only on our traditional sources.”
The destination has lost its main source market, China, as a result of the pandemic. China made up 16.7 per cent of arrivals to the Maldives in 2019, or 284,029 travellers, but between January and March 2022, there were only 971 Chinese visitors.
Since reopening to international travellers in July 2020, the Maldives has become one of the most successful tourist destinations today. Average length of stay among visitors to the Maldives has risen from 7.5 nights pre-Covid to 8.5 nights.
Despite the Ukraine invasion, Russian travellers showed up strongly for the Maldives, recording 52,235 arrivals in January-March 2022 compared to 26,284 for the same period in 2019.
Thoyyib Mohamed, managing director/CEO of the state-run Maldives Marketing and Public Relations Corporation, also shared that the UK and Italy are performing well, bringing 50,584 and 52,848 travellers respectively to the destination in January-March 2022. For the same period in 2019, the two markets recorded 36,116 and 30,036 footfalls respectively.
“We are doing well in comparison to other (destinations),” Abdulla said, adding that the government is targeting 1.4 million to 1.6 million arrivals this year – higher than 2019’s arrival records of 1.48 million.
To build towards that ambition, the Maldives will grow business travel arrivals, facilitate travel for differently-abled people, as well as promote business events, sports tourism, culture tourism, shared deputy tourism minister Naushad Mohamed.
According to Ahmed Nazeer, secretary-general of the Maldives Association of Tourism Industry, resorts across the destination are working towards welcoming corporate groups of 30 pax and more.
“While Maldives is perceived as a holiday destination, there is a market out there for business travel and event engagements,” he remarked.
The Maldives’ tourism recovery is supported by a continuous stream of new products. Some 23 resorts are in various stages of development, and will soon join new properties that have recently opened.
Velana International Airport opened a new VIP/CIP complex earlier this year as part of the facility’s US$800 million expansion programme, which will add a new runway, passenger terminal, seaplane terminal, a 45-million-litre fuel farm and a cargo facility when the project is complete later this year.
Location
Rooms
F&B
The Japanese government will extend and expand a domestic travel subsidy programme next month as part of plans to give tourism and hospitality providers a much-needed boost.
Named Kenminwari, meaning discount for prefecture residents, the programme covers travel only within individual prefectures or regions, and is due to conclude at the end of June. Now, it is being revamped to operate across all 47 prefectures from early July through the end of August, except during the three-day Bon festival in mid-August.
The new scheme is designed to replace Go To Travel, a nationwide travel subsidy campaign that ran from July 2020 to December 2020 before being cancelled due to an uptick in Covid-19 infections.
The revamped nationwide Kenminwari will grant participants subsidies of up to 50 per cent of their accommodation cost or as much as 8,000 yen (US$59) per person per overnight stay for both accommodation and transportation, as well as up to 2,000 yen in coupons for dining and shopping.
Through the programme, tourism minister Tetsuo Saito said the government hopes “to promote trips to places that are further away”.
Indeed, the revised programme will allow travellers from Tokyo, Osaka and other large cities to visit anywhere in Japan of their choosing – a significant condition for domestic tourism recovery given their large population. During the 2020 launch of Go To Travel in Tokyo, then-chief cabinet secretary Katsunobu Kato had said travel from Tokyo to other parts of Japan accounted for 20 per cent of the country’s travel market.
Of the unused 830 billion yen previously granted to the Go To Travel campaign, the government plans to allocate 560 billion yen to the expanded Kenminwari programme.
To avoid a surge of Covid-19 infections, participants in Kenminwari must be triple-vaccinated or show proof of a negative Covid-19 test. Prefectures will also be able to suspend the programme should their rate of infection rise significantly.