The Chennai International Airport is considered a two-star facility by Skytrax. The national carrier is heavily investing in the Indian market, aiming to reach 100,000 Indian tourists by next year, up from 54,000 last year.
Starting from April 13th, Air Mauritius will connect Plaisance to Chennai once a week. This marks the third major city in India that the airline will serve since emerging from voluntary administration in September 2021. No other country is as well served by Air Mauritius.
The national aviation company already operates flight six times a week to Mumbai and three times a week to Delhi. After the west coast of India, with Mumbai being the largest city in the country, and the north, with Delhi as the capital of India, Air Mauritius is now focusing on Chennai, the capital of the Tamil Nadu state located on the east coast of India bordering the Bay of Bengal.
To serve Chennai, Air Mauritius will deploy an A330 with 254 seats. The direct flight from Chennai International Airport to Plaisance Airport will take approximately 5 hours and 45 minutes.
Flights departing from Chennai will operate on Saturdays and those departing from Mauritius on Fridays. “The goal is to reach the number of Indian tourists we had before Covid, which was around 80,000 people per year. In 2023, we had 54,000 tourists from this country,” says Arvind Bundhun, director of the Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority (MTPA), currently touring in India.
The ambition is to reach 100,000 Indian tourists by 2025, which is just under double the number of Indian arrivals from last year. Speaking to journalists in India on Monday evening, Laurent Recoura, Officer-in-Charge of Air Mauritius, expressed his delight in “resuming our operations from Chennai after a four-year hiatus”.
He went on to state that “Mauritius and India share a special relationship based on interpersonal connections. The two countries are united by heritage, language, and geography”.
However, the Indian market is far from being the main source of tourists to Mauritius. According to official statistics for 2023, India, with its 1.4 billion inhabitants and close ties to Mauritius, ranks sixth with 54,137 arrivals out of a total of 1,295,410 arrivals to all destinations.
The Indian market only represents 4.18%. In 2022, the number was 36,956 for India out of 997,290 tourist arrivals. At the top of the list of tourist-emitting markets are France, with 319,522 tourist arrivals in 2023, followed by the UK (145,873), Reunion (134,222), Germany (118,546), South Africa (106,169), and then India. Switzerland is in seventh place with 34,585 tourist arrivals last year.
Source: Defi Media
