Male’, Maldives – Despite facing multiple challenges in the country due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, Maldives has managed to achieve its targeted arrival for the year 2020 by welcoming over 554,800 tourists before the new year began.
The Tourism Minister of Maldives, Abdulla Mausoom stated on 2020 that the ministry expects Maldives to welcome at least 100,000 tourists by December 16 and to have an annual arrival target of 500,000 by December 25.
While the target of welcoming 100,000 tourists since the border reopening was achieved on December 12, 2020, Maldives also managed to achieve its second target of welcoming 500,000 tourists in the year 2020 despite closing the borders for almost four months.
Along with this, Maldives was also able to achieve the targeted hope of Minister Mausoom to receive over 40,000 tourists in just the remaining 10 days of 2020 as the country had recorded over 542,000 annual tourist arrivals on December 27th.
On the last day of 2020, Minister Mausoom tweeted to thank all the citizens and employees who worked hard on making Maldives an exemplary destination in the world.
According to Minister Mausoom, although the borders of Maldives was closed for only three months, from May to July, the tourists only started coming to the country from October onwards and that it was basically a closure of eight months for the country.
However, as the Tourism Ministry has been proactively doing various activities and taking measures to promote tourism in the country, the country has managed to successfully welcome more than its targeted amount of tourists to the country.
While the island nation does not require tourist to go through quarantine or testing on arrival, all the tourists are required to complete an online health declaration form given by the country and to also provide a negative PCR test result along with it. The PCR test must be taken at least 96 hours prior to departure.
However, due to the newly found Covid-19 variant in United Kingdom, tourists arriving from UK on work visas and locals who spend over 12 hours in UK will have to go through a mandatory 10 day quarantine period in Maldives upon arrival.
