Tourism Ministry has announced that the total tourist arrivals in 2019 have reached 1.7 million.
According to the statistics by the Ministry, 171, 292 tourists visited the Maldives in the month of December making the total tourist arrivals in 2019 to 1,702,831. This is a 14.7% increase compared to 2018. This is a record amount of tourist arrivals in the history of Maldives tourism.
The strongest performance region-wise in 2019 was from Europe (49%) with a 14.8% increase and 833,904 tourists.
The second strongest performance was from Asia & the Pacific (41.4%). There were 705,117 tourists from this region in the year. This is a 13.5% increase compared to 2018.
This was followed by American countries (5%) with 84,793 tourists, Middle East (3.5%) with 60,003 tourists and Africa with 18, 698 tourists.
The top 10 country-wise markets were China (16.7%), India (9.7%), Italy (9.7%), Germany (8%), UK (7.7%).
The most significant increase in 2019 tourist arrivals was from India with 166,015 tourists and an 83.5% increase compared to the previous year.
Maldives achieved its target of 1.5 million tourist arrivals on November 24, 2019. While 1.6 million tourists had visited the country by December 15, the number increased to 1.7 million by the end of the year.