The Maldives welcomed a record 5,100 tourist arrivals in a single day on 21 February, surpassing its previous record of 4,856 on 14 February a week earlier.
Crossing 5,000 foreign tourist arrivals in a day for a popular tourist destination like the Maldives would be nothing unusual in the days before Covid, but the Indian Ocean island archipelago became one of the biggest international tourism success stories in 2020.
At a time when many other destinations kept their borders closed, the Maldives instead chose to fully reopen to all travellers since 15 July 2020.
According to the Maldives' Ministry of Tourism, a total of 147,744 tourists arrived in the country between 1 February and 17 February 2021.
Leading source markets are India and Russia, recording 32,970 and 32,019 foreign arrivals respectively, while Ukraine took the third position with 10,178 tourist arrivals. The remaining top source markets include Kazakhstan, Romania, Germany, France, the UK, Czech Republic and the US.
According to Forwardkeys, the Maldives has become the hottest destination for Russian travellers at the start of 2021. As per bookings issued by 20 January for travel up to 21 April, tickets to the Maldives were advancing the fastest, ahead by +44%, while tickets for total international travel lagged by 87% when compared to 2020 levels.
"Our initial strategies for the market had to be completely shifted due to the pandemic," said Thoyyib Mohamed, managing director of Visit Maldives. "We altered our focus to utilise online & digital platforms to maintain the destination presence and partnered with some of the leading Russian tourism-related organisations, operators, travel agents and travel TV channels in order to spread knowledge about our destination to boost arrivals from Russia.”
Tourists to the Maldives are not required to quarantine nor test on arrival, although they do need to complete an online health declaration form within 24 hours prior to departure and produce a negative PCR test conducted at least 96 hours prior to their departure.