Lessons from the Maldives: navigating three shocks
A pandemic switched off the Maldives’ biggest source market. An invasion cratered the one that replaced it. A boycott took the third. Each time, the visitor mix rebuilt around the hole and the total kept climbing: 20% above 2019 by 2024, and a record 2.25 mn in 2025.
Sri Lanka, the same size to within a third of a percent in 2024, stands beside it throughout: many of the same markets, with far more riding on the biggest one.
Through a closure, an invasion and a boycott, the annual total ended higher after every shock
Tourist arrivals to the Maldives by year. Markers show the three shocks to the market at the top of the table.
Source: MBS Statistical Yearbook, Table 10.13, editions 2019 to 2026.
The three shocks, in brief
2020 · Pandemic
China, one arrival in six, stopped coming. Russia and India filled more than half the gap, and thirteen months after reopening the Maldives had a bigger month than 2019.
2022 · Invasion
Russia’s April arrivals came in three-quarters below the year before. By July they were back above it, and Russia has not left the No. 2 spot it took in 2020.
2024 · Boycott
India slid from No. 1 to 6th and stayed there. The market set a record anyway: 2.25 mn arrivals in 2025.
Part one · The table
The whole story sits in one monthly table
Only one of the three shocks is visible in the bars above: 2020 is the series’ single down year. All three are visible in the nationality columns underneath. This essay reads the columns.
Everything on this page traces to Table 10.13 of the Maldives Bureau of Statistics’ Statistical Yearbook: monthly tourist arrivals by country of nationality, roughly seventy named countries a year, stitched here across eight editions into one series from January 2018 to December 2025, with the ministry’s monthly reports carrying it to May 2026. Every figure is recomputed from the published workbooks.2
The table counts heads: one person crossing the border once, whatever they spend or how long they stay. So this is a story about the mix of markets, not the value of them, and it stays at that level deliberately; the Maldives’ one-island-one-resort product means its occupancy and revenue arithmetic transfers nowhere else.
Three shocks, three different outcomes
Share of annual arrivals, 2018 to 2025, one panel for each market the shocks hit. The dashed line marks the year each shock landed; the ranks between these three were held by the UK, Germany and Italy throughout.1
Source: MBS Statistical Yearbook, Table 10.13, editions 2019 to 2026.
These annual ranks sit on top of constant churn: the monthly lead changed hands 42 times across the 96 months, and it rotates in ordinary years too. China, Germany and Italy traded it through 2018 and 2019; China, the UK and Russia traded it through 2025.1 The three episodes below are a different kind of event, a large market losing most or all of its volume inside weeks, and each one is followed, in the same table, by the rebuild.
Part two · The three episodes
What each shock took, and what filled the gap
China: the switch-off
- China 2019
- 284,029 · No. 1
- Jan 2020 share
- 18.3%
- Mar 2020
- 498
- Apr to Jun 2020
- 0 (border shut)
- Reopening
- 15 Jul 2020
- To 50% of 2019
- 5 months
- To a bigger month than 2019
- 13 months
- China all of 2021
- 2,238 · 49th
- China 2024
- 263,340 · No. 1
The market that had supplied roughly one arrival in six went to zero, and the destination’s monthly run-rate was bigger than before within thirteen months of reopening. On 15 July 2020 the Maldives reopened to all nationalities without quarantine, one of very few destinations anywhere to do so;3 by December 2020 monthly arrivals were back to 56% of their 2019 level, and August 2021 beat August 2019 outright, with 273 Chinese arrivals where there had been 32,757.
The refill was concentrated: against 2019’s pace, Russia and India covered 55% of the missing China volume between them, all gaining markets 83%.
What the table shows is an offset arriving in the same months, in a market that was nearly alone in being open; it does not show one nationality taking another’s rooms, and thirteen months is a fact about that unrepeatable market, not a benchmark.
31,744 in January, zero by April
Monthly arrivals from China, 2019 to 2021.
Source: MBS Yearbook, Table 10.13, eds. 2020 to 2022.
Thirteen months from reopening to a bigger month than 2019
Total monthly arrivals as % of the same month of 2019.
Source: MBS Yearbook, Table 10.13, eds. 2020 to 2023.
What filled the months: Russia and India gained more than half of what China stopped sending
Gain in arrivals versus the same months of 2019, August 2020 to December 2021, top eight gainers. China’s missing volume over the window: roughly 393,000.
Source: MBS Yearbook, Table 10.13, eds. 2020 to 2022. Gains computed against the same calendar months of 2019.
Russia: the crater that healed in a season
- 23 Feb 2022, YTD
- 15.8% · No. 1
- Apr 2022
- 5,384 · −76.5%
- Rank that month
- 7th
- Months below prior year
- 4
- Back above prior year
- Jul 2022 · +7.9%
- Monthly No. 1 again
- Jul to Sep 2022
- Full-year 2022
- 201,954 · −9.2%
- 2024
- 225,204 · above 2021 peak
- 2025
- 278,761 · +23.8%
This shock landed and healed inside the same year. March to June 2022 lost 45,552 Russian arrivals against the prior year, more than twice the size of the eventual full-year decline; every other month of 2022 ran ahead, and Russia was the largest market of July, August and September. The full-year figure, −9.2% vs 2021, is the net of a crater and a rebound.6
The recovery then kept going: past the pre-invasion peak in people by 2024 and up another 23.8% in 2025, while the market grew 55% around it, diluting Russia’s share from 16.8% in 2021 to 11.0% in 2024.
Three-quarters below prior-year in April, above it by July
Monthly arrivals from Russia, 2021 to 2023. The dashed line marks the invasion.
Source: MBS Yearbook, Table 10.13, eds. 2022 to 2024.
One switch-off, one V: each shock against its own prior year
Monthly arrivals as % of the same month one year earlier: China through 2020, Russia through 2022.
Source: MBS Yearbook, Table 10.13, eds. 2020 to 2023.
India: the slide the market grew straight through
- 2023
- 209,193 · No. 1 by 477
- First YoY fall
- Mar 2023
- Boycott row
- early Jan 20249
- Feb to May 2024
- −49% mean YoY
- 2024
- 130,805 · 6th · −37.5%
- 2025
- 131,625 · 6th · +0.6%
- Jan to May 2026
- 52,201 · −5.8%
- Market 2024
- 2,046,615 · +8.9%
- Market 2025
- 2,246,516 · record
The third episode is the one without a market-specific recovery, and the total grew anyway. Indian arrivals turned negative in March 2023, ten months before the Lakshadweep row, and stayed negative for 22 straight months; from February 2024 the fall tripled in depth, to a −49% average through May.
Reversion from the pandemic-era peak explains only about 12% of the 2024 fall against a 2019-share baseline, and the deepening sits on top of both the boycott and India’s April-to-June general election, which the arrivals table cannot separate.9
What the table does show cleanly: China’s 2024 gains came in its own seasons rather than India’s worst months, and the destination set a record in 2025 with its former No. 1 still at 5.9% of the mix.10
Falling for ten months before the boycott; three times as fast after it
Indian arrivals, change on the same month one year earlier, 2023 to 2024.
Source: MBS Yearbook, Table 10.13, eds. 2023 to 2025.
China’s 2024 gains came in February and July to August, not India’s months
Monthly arrivals from India and China, 2023 to 2024.
Source: MBS Yearbook, Table 10.13, eds. 2024 and 2025.
Two years on: the market 20% above its 2023 level, India at 63% of its own
Total arrivals and Indian arrivals, indexed to 2023 = 100. 2025 from the ministry’s series.
Source: MBS Yearbook, Table 10.13, eds. 2024 to 2026.
2,246,516
Arrivals in 2025, a record, set the year after the third shock · +9.8% vs 2024 · MBS Yearbook, 2026 edition
Part three · The reshuffle
The market is as top-heavy as it was in 2019, under different names
Each episode redistributed share. The flattest year was 2024, with no market above 12.9%; then the recovery re-concentrated, and China’s 2025 consolidation put the top share at 14.6% and the concentration index within two points of its 2019 level (642 against 644).11
What changed is who carries the weight: Russia holds 12.4% of a market it held 4.9% of in 2019, India holds 5.9% where it held 9.7%, and the UK edged past Germany and Italy.
The one squeeze ran the other way: 2021, when the buyer pool was whoever could fly, put India and Russia together at 38.9% and pushed the index to 926, 44% above its 2019 level.
What the episodes tested was the speed at which other names on the table could take weight: Russia and India after the closure, Russia’s own restored routings after the invasion,6 China’s return after the boycott, in its own seasons rather than India’s. The index is computed on year-end shares; the filling happened mid-year.
2019 to 2025: one riser, two fallers, and a middle that barely moved
Share of annual arrivals, the eight largest markets of 2025, in 2019 and in 2025.
Source: MBS Yearbook, Table 10.13, eds. 2020 and 2026.
Concentration round-tripped: down through the shocks, back to 2019’s level by 2025
The No. 1 market’s annual share (bars, coloured by holder) and the concentration index (dashed line), 2018 to 2025.
Source: MBS Yearbook, Table 10.13, eds. 2019 to 2026. HHI across named countries.
Part four · Sri Lanka, beside it
Two islands the same size, two different sets of curves
The comparison is unusually clean at the arrivals level, and it stays there. In 2024 Sri Lanka recorded 2,053,465 arrivals and the Maldives 2,046,615, a third of a percent apart, selling the same winter to many of the same markets: Sri Lanka’s top five (India, Russia, the UK, Germany, China) all sit inside the Maldives’ top six. Nothing downstream of an arrival transfers, not the enclave resorts, not the charter networks, not the price points, so the charts below compare market mix and nothing else. Sri Lanka’s figures are from the SLTDA’s reports and the H1 2026 review, cited rather than re-derived.12
The Maldives passed its 2018 size in 2022. Sri Lanka crossed it in 2025.
Annual arrivals indexed to 2018 = 100. Each destination’s own shocks marked.
Source: MBS Statistical Yearbook, Table 10.13 (Maldives); SLTDA annual data via the Sarendia visitor-management essay and Year in Review 2025 (Sri Lanka).
Both islands set records in 2025, and they got there on different concentration paths. The Maldives’ record year, 2,246,516, had China on top at 14.6%. Sri Lanka’s record, 2,362,521, had India at 22.5%, up from 20.3% in 2024, and India’s share of the 2026 half now stands at 25.6%.
The same names, weighted differently: 2024’s top tables side by side
Share of each destination’s 2024 arrivals, top six markets. Shared names carry the same colour.
Source: MBS Yearbook, Table 10.13, ed. 2025; SLTDA Year in Review 2025.
Sri Lanka’s own annual tables run back a decade, and they show how differently the two mixes arrived at those records.13 India has been Sri Lanka’s largest market in every year since 2016. Its share held between 17% and 19% for five years, spiked to 28.9% of the near-empty 2021, and has run a fifth or more of the table every year since 2023: 20.4%, then 20.3%, then 22.5% in the record 2025.
India has been Sri Lanka’s No. 1 every year of the decade. China never came back after 2019.
Share of Sri Lanka’s annual arrivals, 2016 to 2025, four markets. The shaded band marks the near-empty years (507,704 arrivals in 2020; 194,495 in 2021), where shares distort.
Source: SLTDA Annual Statistical Reports and Year in Review reports, 2016 to 2025 editions, arrivals-by-country tables (country of residence).
The rest of Sri Lanka’s table moved the way the Maldives’ did, without the return leg. China carried 13.2% of Sri Lanka in 2016 and was already falling before the Easter attacks; it stands at 5.6% in 2025, on less than half its 2016 volume, in a market that is larger. In the Maldives, China is back at No. 1. Russia rose through Sri Lanka’s disaster years, 9.7% in 2020, 12.7% in 2022, No. 2 at 13.3% in 2023, and has faded since; the January-to-June slide charted below is the latest instalment. The UK and Germany held their weight on both islands. What rotated in Malé consolidated in Colombo.
Annual No. 1 share, like for like: the lines crossed in 2019, and Sri Lanka’s has been higher every year since
The largest market’s share of each island’s annual arrivals. Annual against annual, the comparison the monthly figures can’t give.
Source: MBS Yearbook, Table 10.13, eds. 2019 to 2026 (nationality); SLTDA annual reports, 2018 to 2025 (residence).13
Annual against annual, the gap is smaller than June’s 50.3% suggests, and it is real. Sri Lanka’s top market has carried a larger share than the Maldives’ in every year since 2019, and the two record years of 2025 closed at 22.5% against 14.6%. Concentration spiked on both islands in pandemic 2021, an index of 1,123 in Sri Lanka against the Maldives’ 926, and the two settled differently: the Maldives’ top-market share is below its 2019 level, Sri Lanka’s has been above its own in every year since 2023.13
Sri Lanka’s first half of 2026 closed at 1,146,573 arrivals, 1.8% below 2025 and 1.6% below 2018, and the flat total decomposes into one large movement each way: India up 21.4% (+51,689, to 293,683, a quarter of the half), the sixty-plus other markets down 7.9% between them (−73,160).
In June alone India supplied 34.9% of the month, and the top three markets 50.3%.
Russia ran the half’s steepest single-market decline, from 27,134 in January to 1,276 in June, third place to nineteenth, below its 2025 level in every month of the half.
One market carried the half: India’s gain against everyone else’s net change
Change in Sri Lankan arrivals vs the same month of 2025: India’s contribution and the net of all other markets, January to June 2026.
Source: SLTDA monthly arrivals reports, January to June 2026.
Russia against its own prior year: the Maldives re-crossed within five months; Sri Lanka’s half stayed below
Each panel shows Russian arrivals in the shock year (solid) against the same destination one year earlier (dashed), so each market’s own seasonality is controlled for.
Source: MBS Yearbook, Table 10.13, eds. 2022 to 2023; SLTDA monthly reports, January to June 2026.
The largest market carries a quarter of Sri Lanka’s 2026; the Maldives’ carries a sixth
Top three markets’ shares of year-to-date arrivals: Sri Lanka January to June 2026, Maldives January to May 2026. Near-matching windows; both cumulative.
Source: SLTDA monthly reports (Jan to Jun 2026); Ministry of Tourism Maldives monthly statistics (Jan to May 2026).
Close · The lesson
Three times the top of the table fell away. The total ended higher every time.
| Episode | Trough | Time below prior year | The year after | Two years after |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| China · 2020 | 0 arrivals, Apr to Jun 2020 (border closed; China near zero into 2023) | Market: 13 months to a bigger month than 2019 | 2021: 1.32 mn, 78% of 2019, China absent | 2022: 1.68 mn, 98% of 2019, China still absent |
| Russia · 2022 | 5,384 in Apr 2022, −76.5%, 7th place | Russia: 4 months; above prior year from July | 2023: 209,146, +3.6%, No. 2 | 2024: 225,204, above the 2021 peak |
| India · 2024 | −55.7% in Apr 2024; 22 straight negative months | India: not yet, as of May 2026 | 2025: India 131,625, +0.6%; market +9.8%, a record | Jan to May 2026: India −5.8%; market −4.7% |
Each recovery ran on its own clock: past the 2019 level within three years of the closure, up 27% in the invasion year itself, at a record the year after the boycott with the hole India left still open. Eight printed years, three direct hits, one down year.
Sri Lanka’s table, the same size and carrying many of the same names, is running its own version now: one market climbing, the other sixty a net 73,160 behind, the third-largest of January down to nineteenth by June. In the Maldives’ eight printed years, no market held more than 22.1% of an annual table, and that took the pandemic squeeze. India carries 25.6% of Sri Lanka’s half.
That is the lesson the eight years leave. A destination the same size as Sri Lanka, selling the same winter to many of the same markets, lost the biggest name on its table to a pandemic, an invasion and a boycott, and came back bigger from all three. The Maldives’ own first five months of 2026 run 4.7% below last year. What the next columns print, on either island, no table has printed yet.
1 “No. 1” is counted at annual grain unless stated otherwise. At monthly grain the lead changed 42 times across the 96 months (the near-zero months of the 2020 closure produce four of those; excluding them, 38). Russia’s 2022 leadership was monthly and year-to-date, never annual: the annual crown changed hands twice in the window (China to India, 2020; India to China, 2024), with China’s 2025 title a hold, not a change.
2 Three source-file defects were patched, each recorded in the pipeline: Ukraine’s 2023 and 2024 annual-total cells are blank in the published workbooks (totals rebuilt as the sum of their twelve months: 12,051 and 14,087); Taiwan is zeroed with blank months in the same editions; Uzbekistan first appears as a named row in the 2023 data year. None affects any figure on this page.
3 The Maldives reopened to tourists of all nationalities on 15 July 2020, resuming on-arrival visas with no mandatory quarantine and no test required at the border; a negative pre-departure PCR result became mandatory only from 10 September 2020 (Ministry of Tourism, “Updates on the Covid-19 Situation in the Maldives”; Visit Maldives, “COVID-19 Updates”). For scale, UN Tourism’s sixth review of COVID-19 related travel restrictions (published 30 July 2020, on data as of 19 July) counted 115 destinations, 53% of all destinations worldwide, with borders still completely closed to international tourism.
4 China dropped inbound quarantine and reopened its borders on 8 January 2023 (AFP), then announced on 20 January that outbound group tours would resume on a pilot basis from 6 February, limited to twenty named destinations (Global Times; CGTN). The Maldives was named in that same notice, among the first twenty (Atoll Times); the pilot was widened to roughly forty more countries on 10 March 2023. So the reopening the arrivals column registers is the February pilot, not a general lifting in January.
5 Ministry of Tourism, “Maldives Tourism Updates”, Issue 08, published 24 February 2022, data as of 23 February 2022: Russia 15.8% (39,660 of 251,339 year-to-date arrivals), United Kingdom second at 11.4%, India third at 8.8%. A widely-cited press version (“15.7%, as of 22 February”) mis-transcribes the same bulletin. Issues 07 and 09 bracket it: 15.8% on 16 February, 15.2% on 2 March.
6 Why the crater closed is outside this table. Aeroflot announced on 5 March 2022 that it would suspend almost all international flights from 8 March (Al Jazeera), and Visa and Mastercard both announced the suspension of their Russian operations the same day, cutting off Russian-issued cards abroad (Visa; Mastercard). Direct Moscow to Malé service resumed on 13 May 2022 (Travel Trade Maldives). Whatever kept flying did not prevent the fall; the restoration is the part the recovery rests on. The payment side is not traceable in dated Maldives-specific records and is left out here.
7 The 2023 figures exist in a single yearbook vintage, and cross-source revisions in this dataset run to thousands of arrivals (the ministry’s preliminary 2024 Russia figure differs from the yearbook’s by 7,480). A 47-arrival margin should be read as a tie the record happens to score for India.
8 With one interruption: from 13 May 2021 the Maldives suspended tourist visas for travellers arriving from, or having passed through, seven South Asian countries in the previous fourteen days, a measure taken during the mid-2021 surge (Maldives Immigration; Al Jazeera). It keyed off origin and recent travel history, not nationality, and the reopening was staged: resorts could take those travellers again from 15 July 2021, guesthouses on inhabited islands only from 30 July (Ministry of Tourism circular, 7 July 2021). “Open throughout 2021” would overstate it.
9 The early-January 2024 sequence: Narendra Modi visited Lakshadweep on 2 and 3 January 2024 (The Tribune); three Maldivian deputy ministers were suspended on 7 January over derogatory posts about him (Al Jazeera); the #BoycottMaldives campaign followed, and an Indian booking platform suspended Maldives flight sales on 8 January (Reuters; SBS). India’s general election ran from 19 April to 1 June 2024, with counting on 4 June (Election Commission of India schedule, 16 March 2024). The monthly table can date the deepening (February 2024); it cannot apportion it between these.
10 2025 figures are from the yearbook’s 2026 edition (published June 2026) and sit on the same recomputed spine as every other year; the Ministry of Tourism’s preliminary December-2025 report matches the yearbook exactly. 2026 figures are from the ministry’s May-2026 monthly statistical report (published 3 June 2026), machine-extracted from the archived PDF and reconciled against the table’s own totals; no yearbook edition exists for 2026 yet. From January 2026 the ministry also publishes a broader visitor measure including business and cruise travellers; this page uses the holiday-tourist line throughout.
11 The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index: the sum of squared market shares (in percentage points), computed across the named countries in the table, which carry 97 to 98% of all arrivals. Higher means more concentrated; ten equal markets score 1,000.
12 Sri Lanka figures are from the SLTDA monthly arrivals reports (January to June 2026) and Year in Review 2025, as compiled for the Sarendia H1 2026 review; they are cited, not re-derived through this page’s pipeline. Year-to-date concentration figures compare a six-month Sri Lankan window with a five-month Maldivian one (the latest published); cumulative shares, not single months, on both sides.
13 Sri Lanka’s annual by-country figures are extracted from the SLTDA Annual Statistical Reports and Year in Review reports, 2016 to 2025 editions, arrivals-by-country tables, archived in the project. Four caveats. The SLTDA tables count by country of residence; the Maldives series counts by nationality: close cousins, not identical, so cross-island share comparisons are like-for-like in grain (annual) but not in basis. The 2024 and 2025 reports print top-20 tables only (top-market and top-3 shares are exact; full-table statistics such as the concentration index stop at 2023, whose report lists 190 countries). The 2019 report ships with no machine-readable text layer; its table was transcribed from page renders and cross-checked arithmetically, and its China figure matches the dashboard’s series independently. The 2021 table’s rows sum 100 arrivals (0.05%) short of its printed total, a defect in the source file, left as printed. Concentration indexes here follow footnote 11’s convention: named countries only, which carry 98 to 99% of Sri Lankan totals in the full-table years.
Sources
Maldives Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Yearbook, editions 2019 to 2026, Table 10.13, archived locally with checksums. Ministry of Tourism, Republic of Maldives, weekly updates and monthly statistical reports, including the February 2022 bulletins and the December 2025 and May 2026 monthlies, archived. Sri Lanka: SLTDA monthly arrivals reports (January to June 2026) and Year in Review 2025, via the Sarendia H1 2026 review.
Related on Sarendia
Lessons from Bali · Bali’s foreign arrivals nearly tripled between 2009 and 2025, to a record 6.95 million; its hotels and restaurants grew faster, so occupancy never broke out of its long-run band. H1 2026 tourism review · India added 51,689 visitors over the half, holding Sri Lanka’s six-month total to 1.8% below last year. Sri Lanka Tourism Dashboard · A multi-year view of Sri Lanka tourism through 2025, drawn from the SLTDA Year-in-Review series.
Method
Every Maldives yearbook figure is recomputed from the published workbooks through a parse-derive-assert pipeline: each edition parsed to structured data, internal sums reconciled exactly against the tables’ own regional and monthly totals, the stitched series checked against an assertion gate, and the whole set re-derived independently a second time, from the PDFs as well as the spreadsheets, before writing. Where two editions publish the same data year, the vintages match cell for cell, and the 2025 year additionally reconciles exactly with the ministry’s preliminary series. Ministry 2026 figures are machine-extracted from the archived PDFs and reconciled against the tables’ own totals and printed percentages; SLTDA figures are quoted from their published tables and flagged as such where used.
Glossary
- HHI
- Herfindahl-Hirschman Index: the sum of squared percentage market shares. A single-market monopoly scores 10,000; ten equal markets score 1,000. Used here to compare the same market with itself over time.
- vintage
- The edition of a statistical publication a figure comes from. Preliminary vintages get revised; this page uses the yearbook for 2018 to 2025 and the ministry’s monthlies for 2026, and flags where the difference matters.