Published on : Thursday, August 8, 2019
As the surging numbers of Chinese visitors to the Indian Ocean island’s resorts helped in strengthening an 11% yearly growth rate in tourists in 2015, that dampened it to 4.3% in 2018, partly due to the scrapping of direct flights by China Southern Airlines Co.
In 2015 Mauritius drew 90,000 Chinese visitors. The total in 2019 is probably to be less than half that, as per the statistics from the national statistics agency. A weak pound and the prospect of currency plunge further, if the U.K. leaves Europe this year, is another cause for concern: The U.K. is Mauritius’s fourth-biggest source of tourists.
However, at present the Saudis are coming and for the country, famous for immaculate beaches and lofty mountains, that’s a bonus. Tourism estimates for 8% of its GDP and indirectly hires a fifth of its workforce. In the initial half of 2019, Saudi visitors almost doubled to 9,219 compared to 2018. Credit goes to the three flights a week from Riyadh and Jeddah introduced by Saudi Arabian Airlines in 2017. Diplomatic relations between the two countries have fortified since, with Mauritius setting up an embassy in Saudi Arabia in 2018 and a state visit from Saudi’s interior minister a few weeks later.
“It’s really been a happy surprise,” Jean-Michel Pitot, chairman of Mauritius’s association of hotel and restaurant owners, said in an interview in the capital, Port Louis. “Those planes are well-filled. I didn’t expect that.”
As the Indian Ocean island nation has conventionally enjoyed a stable flow of visitors from Europe, a legacy of its colonial history, it’s been trying hard for many years to attract tourists from other continents. For Americans, it’s simply a distant place! The African market, regardless of its proximity, remains mainly unexploited due to poor flight connections and the relatively high cost of vacationing in Mauritius.