Inner Maldives Holidays Marketing Team has done a comprehensive study on the consumer buying patterns recently and also the previous years model, to be able to forecast our Winter 2006/07 forecast.

We have also analyzed the statistics given by the Ministry of Tourism, Statistics section and also the information from Department of Immigration and Emigration based on previous arrivals and forecasted the upcoming trend in comparison with the growth in the market and in the industry. As during the past Winter 2005/06 we saw the affects of over 2000 beds been off the market where the product was more scare with running up prices. The demand still seems to be increasing rapidly with the given global/ regional situation of competing destinations. Though the supply seems to be limited but growing and shall see some positive trend and hope this increases rapidly with the arrival of new properties in the market.

Emerging markets such as Russia and China is showing positive growth but will be over shadowed in the Winter as the European operators seem to have a stronger foot hold in the market with exclusive allotments and recent increase in big British operators dropping lump sums to buy out huge amounts of guaranteed rooms. And this will be supported with the increased charter flights, thus overall we hope to see a very positive season to come.

(Figure 1.0 – Tourist Arrivals Trend Winter 2006/07)

(Figure 2.0 – Occupancy Trend Winter 2006/07)

(Figure 3.0 – Market distribution Winter 2006/07)

(Figure 4.0 – Market distribution - Europe Winter 2006/07)

(Figure 5.0 – Tourism Growth 2005/06)