The Mauritian tourism industry showed signs of a crisis even before the current COVID situation. The growth of international air arrivals was starting to stagnate, and hotel groups were struggling to remain competitive.
Our current destination offering and positioning still rely on a winning formula developed in the 50s, its version 1.0: a beach-resort, retreat-like-experience, in an exotic and tropical ecosystem. As much as there is still demand for this product (although mainly from older generations), our leading competitors, Seychelles and Maldives, now have the edge on Mauritius. Their respective ecosystem is indeed much more exotic, less developed, than our country today, ultimately making that holiday-product a better one. In short, they have today the same edge we had in our early days of tourism.
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