Airfares are “killing” Maldivians!

Number of Maldivians travelling abroad will be one of the highest in the world per capita. One of the biggest challenge faced by Maldivians is the extremely high airfare.

One of the most frequent destination of Maldivian travelers is India. To travel fromT hiruvananthapuram to Dubai, it costs 153 dollars. The distance between the two cities is 2948 kilometers. It takes just 5 cents per kilometer.
The distance between Male’ and Thiruvananthapuram is around 400 kilometers. The airfares between these two cities costs 260 to 450 dollars. Even if we take it as 300 dollars, the cost is 75 cents per kilometer. Thus making it 70 cents more expensive than Dubai to Thiruvananthapuram.

To fly to Malaysia from Maldives by AirAsia costs 300 dollars or more. But if it is from Sri Lanka, the ticket price is around 100 dollars. There are so many examples like this. What we know is these expensive airfares are “killing” Maldivians.

This is a big burden for Maldivians. This is also a huge challenge for the Maldivian tourism industry as well. We have to find solutions to this problem because it is directly related to country’s economy too.