For four years running, from 2020 to 2023, India was the largest source of tourists to the Maldives.
Last year it was sixth, behind China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy.
Everyone has the same explanation ready. India was next door when nowhere else was open, we got a windfall, the windfall ended. I believed it myself until I went looking at what happened before 2020.
The market was won before the borders closed
India had been almost nothing here for thirty years. 8,350 visitors in 1988. 25,760 in 2010, when China was already at 122,810. The nearest large market on earth was one of our smallest.
Then look at what happened in the five years before the pandemic.
| Year | Indian arrivals | Per 10,000 Indian departures |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 45,600 | 24.9 |
| 2016 | 66,960 | 30.6 |
| 2017 | 83,020 | 34.7 |
| 2018 | 90,480 | 34.4 |
| 2019 | 166,040 | 61.7 |
Between 2014 and 2019, outbound travel from India grew by about half. Our arrivals from India grew more than threefold. Measured properly, against the size of the market we were selling into, the Maldives went from drawing 24.9 Indian travellers for every ten thousand who left the country to drawing 61.7.
We did not catch a wave. We took share, and we had nearly doubled it before anybody had heard of a travel bubble.
The mechanism was the familiar one, and the border played no part in it. An Indian traveller has never needed a visa for the Maldives, because nobody does. What changed was capacity. Direct routes multiplied out of Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kochi, flown by Indian carriers and our own. Indian wholesalers built honeymoon and wedding packages around the new seats, and Indian cinema supplied the imagery at no cost to us. Seats first, market second.
Then it carried the country
The Maldives reopened on 15 July 2020, early and very nearly alone. In August the two countries established an air travel bubble, the first in South Asia. In a year when total arrivals collapsed to 555,510, India finished 2020 as the largest source market with 62,980 visitors.
In 2021 it sent 291,800, which was 22.1% of everybody who came. No single market had taken a share that large since China's peak years ended in 2017.
The carrier record shows how directly that was flown in. Indian airlines carried 312,404 incoming scheduled passengers in 2021, 22.8% of all scheduled arrivals into Velana, and 297,813 the following year. For two seasons, roughly one seat in five arriving here was on an Indian aircraft.
For an industry trying to reopen after the worst shock in its history, those arrivals mattered. Whatever has happened since, that is the fact.
Eight weeks
In early January 2024, remarks by Maldivian officials about the Indian Prime Minister's visit to Lakshadweep set off a boycott campaign across Indian social media. A major Indian online travel agency suspended Maldives bookings. Indian agents reported revenue from the Maldives segment falling by around 80%.
The data moved almost immediately. By 2 March 2024, Indian arrivals for the year stood at 27,224 against 41,054 in the same period of 2023, a fall of 33%.
The year closed at 130,810, down 37.5%. 2025 came in at 131,640, essentially flat. The first seven months of this year are down another 5%.
Five years of work, gone in two months.
What it actually cost
At the time, figures of $1.8 billion to $2 billion circulated as industry estimates of the damage. They travelled a long way, and the arithmetic behind them is hard to reconcile with the actual fall in arrivals.
India fell from 209,200 arrivals in 2023 to 130,810 in 2024, a loss of 78,390 guests. At 2024's average receipts of $2,338 per tourist, that puts the loss at an estimated $183 million. Serious money, and a severe hit to the businesses carrying it, but about a tenth of what was being claimed.
That matters more than it sounds. If you tell people you have lost two billion dollars, everything that follows is built on it. The panic is bigger than it needs to be, and when the market settles at a sensible level it looks like failure instead of recovery.
Where it actually sits
At 131,640, India is our sixth market. That is a long way below 291,800 and it is not coming back to that number, because 291,800 belonged to a world with nowhere else open.
It is also 45% above where India was in 2018, before any of this began. The pre-pandemic trend was real, it was substantial, and most of it is still standing.
The question I cannot answer is who actually carried it. Arrivals are never published by type of accommodation, so the resorts, guest houses and city hotels that built themselves around Indian demand between 2019 and 2023 took the 2024 fall unevenly, and there is no way to find out who took the worst of it.
The lesson is not the one usually drawn
The conclusion people reach from this episode is that the Maldives should diversify, which is true and unhelpful, because it is true of every destination in every year.
What interests me more is how fragile a market share turns out to be.
We built genuine share in India over five years, using the same method that built China a decade earlier. Capacity first, then distribution, then a product shaped around what the buyer actually wanted. That share was real, measurable and hard-won, and it proved to be worth less than eight weeks of bad politics.
Nothing in the way this industry is run treats political risk as a commercial input. We do not measure it, price it or hedge it, and it moved more arrivals in one quarter of 2024 than any campaign has moved in a year.
And when the repair came, it did not come from a marketing budget. In July 2024 the travel agents' association, the guest house association and the state marketing corporation went to Bengaluru, Mumbai and New Delhi together, with support from the Indian trade. The people who had lost the business went and asked for it back.
We can win share in a large market when we decide to. We have now proved it twice. What we have not worked out is how to keep it when something outside the industry decides otherwise.
Sources
- MMA Statistics Database — arrivals by market and travel receipts, Ministry of Tourism and Environment monthly statistics
- World Bank — international departures from India, series ST.INT.DPRT, which ends in 2019
- Ministry of Tourism and Environment, Tourism Yearbook 2025, Tables 27 to 30 — carrier movements and passengers
- Sun — Indian arrivals at 2 March 2024 and the loss estimates then circulating
- Sun — the joint industry roadshow to Bengaluru, Mumbai and New Delhi, July 2024
- PSM News and the Indian press — the air travel bubble of August 2020
Arrivals per ten thousand departures is calculated from the two sources above. The $183 million estimate is my own, from the arrivals shortfall at the year's published receipts per tourist. Comparable outbound figures for India after 2019 are not yet published, so the share calculation stops there.