Ask three countries the same question and you get three very different answers.
In Dubai, shopping is 31% of what visitors spend, ahead of accommodation at 29%, food and beverage at 22%, local services at 10% and transport at 8%. In Malaysia, the national statisticians put shopping at 36.1% of inbound tourism expenditure in 2024, well ahead of accommodation at 18.5%.
The Maldives has no comparable figure, because retail is not measured. The only Tourism Satellite Account this country has published, for 2017, found accommodation was 81% of international visitor spending, with transport at 9%, food and beverage 5%, recreation 3% and travel agencies 2%. Five categories totalling a hundred, and shopping is not among them.
Two and a quarter million people came last year. Most of their money left with them.
We already know the demand is there
The usual objection is that resort guests do not want to shop. There is a number that tests it, and it has been audited.
Maldives Airports Company sold MVR 688.7 million of duty free goods in 2024, about $44.7 million, up from MVR 609.8 million the year before. Sales grew 12.9% while arrivals grew 8.9%, so spending per head is rising, not falling. Cost of goods was MVR 493.8 million, which puts the gross margin at 28.3%.
Across 2,046,640 arrivals that is roughly $22 per tourist, earned in a terminal, from people with an hour or two to kill.
Two things follow. The first is that the appetite is real and profitable, and nobody has to speculate about whether Maldivian visitors will buy things, because they already do. The second is the size of it. That $44.7 million is under 1% of the $4.79 billion this country earned from tourism in 2024.
Against Dubai's 31% and Malaysia's 36%, our entire organised tourist retail business is a rounding error. And it is not a rounding error because demand is weak. It is a rounding error because an airport terminal is the only place we have ever offered.
What an airport cannot do
A duty free hall is a constrained format and it will stay one however well it is run. The floor area is fixed by the terminal. The category mix runs to liquor, tobacco, fragrance, cosmetics, confectionery and a narrow band of watches and accessories. Fashion at any depth does not fit, and nor does anything a buyer wants to try on, compare or think about.
Most of all, the customer arrives with a departure time. Nobody browses with a boarding gate closing.
Which is why the sensible place for this is not inside the terminal but beside it. Hulhulé and Hulhumalé are the only locations in the country that every departing guest can reach, and since the bridge they are effectively the same place.
Consider what that changes operationally. Today a resort puts a guest on a speedboat and delivers them to the terminal for their flight. Dead time either side, spent in a lounge. Give that guest somewhere worth going and the resort moves the transfer earlier, and the guest spends an afternoon shopping and eating before flying out. The holiday does not change. The itinerary does not change. The only thing that changes is that four or five hours of waiting becomes four or five hours of trading.
That is the one format that reaches resort guests without asking them to alter anything about their holiday, and it is the argument for putting it there rather than anywhere else.
The first cost: money already in the country
If every visitor last year had spent $50 on something to take home, that is about $112 million. At $100 a head, $225 million. At $250, $562 million.
We are currently at about $22.
These are scenarios rather than measurements, and applying Dubai's or Malaysia's share to our receipts would give something near $2 billion, which nobody should quote as achievable. Those are cities with land borders and populations. We have lagoons.
But capture a quarter of their share and you are near $500 million a year. For scale, the Maldives exported $92.23 million of merchandise to the entire world in 2024. A hundred dollars a head from people already standing in the country would be worth more than twice everything we sell abroad.
The second cost: the traveller who never comes
This is the larger one, and the industry rarely discusses it.
Think about how a family actually chooses. They want a beach. The shortlist is the Maldives, Bali, Phuket, Langkawi, Mauritius, Dubai. Every destination on that list except ours offers a beach and somewhere to shop. If shopping matters in that household, the Maldives does not lose on price or on quality. It is eliminated before the comparison begins, because it does not do one of the things they travel to do.
The same logic operates inside a single trip. Four nights here plus three in Dubai is a real itinerary, sold every day, and it is seven nights that could have been seven nights here. The hotel analysts HVS described that pattern in 2016, with travellers spending about five days in the Maldives and then two or three in Sri Lanka.
It matters most in two markets we have spent a decade pursuing. Indian travellers are now among the largest spenders at international duty free, with outbound duty free spending growing faster than China's, and their most-travelled routes are Dubai, Singapore and Bangkok. Survey work on destination choice found 56% of travellers from the United Arab Emirates rating the range of shopping as important in deciding where to go, against 35% of travellers generally.
The evidence stops short of the conclusion, and I would rather say so. No published source shows a traveller picking Bali over the Maldives because of shopping. The visitor survey does not ask. The hypothesis is consistent with everything we know about these markets and it is not proven.
But the absence of proof is not the absence of risk. We compete for beach holidays against destinations that also sell something we do not sell at all.
What an investor would actually see
Most countries tax imported consumer goods heavily, because they have domestic industries to protect. The Maldives has almost none, and the tariff book shows it. These are the standard rates in the National Tariff Book for 2026, before any trade agreement:
| Goods | Import duty |
|---|---|
| Perfumes and toilet waters | 0% |
| Cosmetics and make-up | 0% |
| Clothing | 0% |
| Footwear | 0% |
| Sunglasses | 0% |
| Wrist watches | 5% |
| Smartphones | 5% |
Under the China–Maldives free trade agreement, in force since January, watches and phones arrive at zero as well. The buyer then pays general GST of 8%, against the 16% charged on everything inside a resort.
So perfume can enter this country at no duty and sell at 8%. In most destinations we compete with it would cross a tariff wall first and then meet a higher consumption tax. That is a structural price advantage sitting in a customs schedule nobody had to negotiate for, next to a proven 28% gross margin and a customer base of two and a quarter million people delivered annually at somebody else's expense.
The exceptions are where a conversation with the state would start. Handbags and travel goods carry 20%, jewellery 25%, chocolate confectionery 50%. Those are core categories for this kind of retail, taxed as luxuries rather than treated as stock.
The honest constraints belong here too. Most resort guests never leave their island, so the catchment is the departure window, Malé and Hulhumalé overnighters, day visitors and the guests in 973 guest houses who already move around. And the assumption that Chinese visitors buy luxury on sight is a decade out of date, since Beijing cracked down on the daigou trade, expanded duty free at home and cut import tariffs. Though the same research notes that Chinese shoppers now prefer downtown brand stores to airport duty free, because the merchandising is better and the stock is newer. Our entire proposition is an airport, which is the format losing share.
What we are not measuring
The Fifth Tourism Master Plan says the priority is raising yield and relying less on volume. The instinct is right. But if 81% of what a visitor spends is the room, raising yield means raising room rates, and that is the one lever that also reduces how many people can afford to come.
There is another lever and nobody reports it. Call it non-accommodation spending per visitor. It is not in the monthly statistics or the Tourism Yearbook. It appeared once, for 2017, and has never been updated. We can calculate the airport's share of it because MACL is audited. For everything else, there is no number at all.
We spent fifty years becoming very good at bringing people here. We have $22 a head to show for what happens after they land, in the one place we bothered to put a shop.
Sources
- Auditor General — Maldives Airports Company Limited, audited financial statements 2024: duty free sales and cost of goods
- Maldives Customs Service — National Tariff Book 2026
- MIRA — GST at 8%, tourism GST at 16%, from 1 January 2023
- Maldives Bureau of Statistics — Tourism Satellite Account 2017
- Department of Statistics Malaysia — Tourism Satellite Account 2024
- Oxford Business Group — Dubai visitor spending by category
- MMA Statistics Database — arrivals and travel receipts
- Ministry of Tourism and Environment, Tourism Yearbook 2025 — merchandise exports, guest house numbers
- HVS — Market Update: Maldives, June 2016
- UN Tourism — shopping as a share of Chinese trip expenditure
Rufiyaa convert at 15.42 to the dollar, the rate the Ministry uses. Duty rates are the lines I checked in the tariff book rather than a full audit. The spending scenarios are arithmetic on last year's arrivals, not estimates of money actually lost.