Plan your travel now to visit Maldives in 2016

It is not too soon to plan your travel for next year, and that travel bucket list should include a visit to the Maldives. There are special reasons why the Maldives will be “the” destination to go to next year, and maybe even this year.

Visit Maldives, the Maldives tourism arm, is planning to launch a destination marketing campaign, “Visit Maldives Year 2016,” which will kick start in June of this year. The main objective of this campaign is to reach the goal of increasing tourist arrivals to 1.5 million with a significant increase in tourism receipts. To reach this end, various activities are being planned for this year and next year, much to the delight of those who are fortunate enough to travel to the Maldives.

The islands of the Maldives appear in between the trading route of the Indian Ocean, so visitors from neighboring regions and around the world have come in contact with the islands for as long as history has been recorded. The primary industries in these islands located in the Indian Ocean-Arabian Sea region are tourism and fishing.

Visit Maldives plans to aggressively market the destination by strengthening the Maldives brand and positioning it as an exclusive tourist destination by showcasing the islands’ diversified tourism product. This will, at the same time, foster better solidarity, harmony, and wellbeing for the people of Maldives, which will have a positive trickle-down effect that can be experienced by tourists. The campaign will encourage economic growth and increase job opportunities for locals from across the country in the tourism sector, and promote the ripple effect of tourism to local communities and make the success of the campaign the responsibility of all Maldivians.

Maldivians are quite open to adaptation and are generally welcoming to outside inspiration. The culture has always continued to evolve with the times. Locals still eat fish and fishermen still spend days out at sea, but tourism now takes a standing prominence.

The Maldives tourism arm recently wound up its participation at the Arabian Travel Market (ATM) which was held in Dubai, UAE. This year’s ATM event focused on family travel, a market that has been growing yearly at a rate of around 4.75%. That represents a market that will reach $180 billion by the year 2018, and Saudi Arabians are the world’s biggest spenders when overseas, racking up a per capita average of US$6,666 per trip. For the Maldives to capitalize on these positive statistics, its presence at the ATM was important to its tourism industry.

It is this kind of savvy marketing and dogged determination that will make a visit to the Maldives easily become the memory of a lifetime of travel journeys.