The Maldives reopened its border on 15 July 2020. For the rest of that year the country ran at 21% of its 2019 arrivals.
Russia ran at 80%.
| July–December 2020, against the same months of 2019 | |
|---|---|
| Russia | 80% |
| India | 34% |
| United Kingdom | 32% |
| Germany | 13% |
| The whole country | 21% |
That gap is not explained by anything that happened in 2020. The border opened on the same day for everybody. Whatever brought Russians back that fast was already built before it closed.
What was in place
On 25 December 2019, an Azur Air Boeing 777-300ER landed at Velana from Vnukovo carrying around four hundred passengers from Russia and the CIS. It was a charter programme put together by Resort Life, a Malé destination management company, with Anex Tour as consolidator and seven Maldivian resort groups behind it — Cocoon, Adaaran, Cinnamon, Canareef, Kandima, Villa and Universal.
It worked immediately. Russian arrivals in January 2020 came in at 12,530, against 8,170 that November. The biggest Russian month the country had ever had, in the month after the aircraft started flying.
Less than three months later the world shut.
For most of 2020 that charter programme must have looked like the worst-timed investment in Maldivian tourism. Then the border reopened, and what had been built for it was still there: the resort contracts, the Moscow relationships, the aircraft, an operator who knew how to fill it.
Watch what happens to the share. Russia was 5.3% of arrivals in December 2019. By October 2020 it was 27.9% — more than one arrival in four. With the industry barely running, a quarter of the people getting off aeroplanes were Russian.
Then the rest of the sequence followed, in the order it has followed here before: charter first, scheduled second. Aeroflot went from 320 movements in 2020 to 990 in 2021, carrying 139,193 passengers. Russia closed 2021 at 222,430 arrivals, up 262%.
Who gets the credit
I am wary of articles that hand a national outcome to one man, so let me be careful about what the data does and does not show.
It does not show that Resort Life built the Russian market. Maldiviana has worked Moscow and Malé since 1994. Anex Tour and TUI Russia ran their own Azur Air programme from 25 November 2019; Coral Travel launched its own on Royal Flight that same season. Aeroflot carried the scheduled volume once it existed. A great deal of selling, contracting and relationship-building sits behind those figures, done by people and companies whose work rarely appears in any statistic, and I have not done the work to trace most of it.
What the data does show is one dated, attributable act with a measurable effect behind it. A charter launched in December 2019 is followed by a record January, and then by a recovery four times the national rate in the half-year after reopening. Those numbers give the people who put that aircraft there a great deal of the credit, and I cannot read them any other way.
None of it was done alone, and the backing matters as much as the risk. Seven resort groups put their names behind a wide-body into a market that had collapsed by 42% between 2013 and 2015 and had only just climbed back past its old peak that same year. That is the industry taking a share of somebody else's risk, and without it the aircraft does not fly.
The promotion board then did the other half. MMPRC signed Resort Life to carry the destination into Russia, the CIS and Eastern Europe in June 2022, and this year Visit Maldives put a joint digital campaign behind Maldiviana for the same market. That is public money following private risk rather than substituting for it, and it is the right way round.
Why the market stayed
A windfall explains a good year. It does not explain six.
Russia finished 2025 at 278,770 arrivals — an all-time record, and 3.3 times its 2019 size, in a country that grew 1.3 times over the same period. Through August this year it is up another 16.8%, at 14.6% of all arrivals, while the country as a whole is down 4.3%.
Set that beside India, which took the larger pandemic windfall — 291,800 in 2021 against Russia's 222,430 — and is now at 131,640, a fifth below its 2019 level. Two markets handed the same opportunity. One was carried forward and one was not.
There is something in the Russian numbers that the share hides. Across 2025, Russian arrivals ran almost flat month to month: a peak-to-trough ratio of 1.56, against 2.40 for the United Kingdom and 2.36 for Germany. Russians are 14.2% of arrivals in the low season from May to October, and 10.7% in the high season. They come when the beds are empty. For an industry whose occupancy problem is a low-season problem, that is worth more than the headline percentage suggests.
None of which makes it safe. Russian arrivals fell from 76,490 in 2013 to 44,330 in 2015 — down 42% in two years, the share almost halved. This market has gone away before.
What I take from it
Markets here are built by named people doing specific things. Not by being a beautiful country, which we already were in 2015 when Russia fell by a third. Somebody signs a contract with an airline. Somebody persuades seven resort groups to put their names behind a charter. Somebody opens an office in Moscow and sits in it. The arrivals table records the result and nothing about the cause, which is why the people who do this work are rarely visible in it.
But nobody does it alone, and that is the part worth copying. An individual takes the risk; the resorts take a share of it by backing the route; the promotion board puts the destination behind the operator once the route exists. All three have to turn up. China was built the same way — a carrier on the route, Chinese wholesalers packaging it at their end, and the trade here supporting them — and arrivals went from 122,810 in 2010 to 370,960 in 2014.
The industry should back the person taking that risk, and the reason is arithmetic. A charter does not fill one island. That December aircraft carried four hundred people into a destination of many resorts, and by October 2020 Russians were a quarter of everybody arriving in the country. One operator's risk, spread across the whole destination.
And the method is seats, then everything else. A destination with no aircraft on the route is a brochure. The charter proves the demand exists, the scheduled service makes it permanent, the trade fills in behind.
Australia is at the beginning of the same sequence, and standing still. One airline flies it. One city, Melbourne. One company sells the seats, and only bundled with a hotel. That is exactly where Russia was in December 2019 — except that Russia had seven resort groups and a consolidator behind it within the first season.
Sydney and Perth are not a stretch; they are the next two steps of a process this country has run before, in China and then in Russia. The question is whether the industry will stand behind whoever goes first.
Sources
- MMA Statistics Database — monthly arrivals by market, Ministry of Tourism and Environment
- Statistical Yearbook of Maldives 2026, Table 10.1 — annual arrivals by nationality
- Ministry of Tourism and Environment, Tourism Yearbook 2025, Tables 27–30 — carrier movements and passengers, including Aeroflot
- Travel Trade Maldives — the Azur Air charter launch, 26 December 2019, and the resorts behind it
- Maldives.net.mv — first flight details, aircraft and passenger numbers
- Resort Life — company history, offices and resort contracts, the company's own account
- Hotelier Maldives — Maldiviana, operating Moscow and Malé since 1994
- Russian Travel Digest — the 2019 charter programmes of Anex Tour, TUI Russia and Coral Travel
- Visit Maldives — the 2026 joint campaign with Maldiviana for the Russian market
- World Bank and the Tourism Yearbook — Chinese arrivals, 2010 and 2014
Annual figures are the sum of the twelve months and 2026 covers January to August, compared with the same eight months of 2025. The recovery comparison is July to December 2020 against July to December 2019. The peak-to-trough ratio is the largest month of 2025 divided by the smallest, for each market.