Seychelles welcomed 303,177 visitors in 2016
Seychelles registered a record number of 303, 177 visitors last year, a real success story as described by the former minister for tourism.
For the last two years, Seychelles has continued to attract more and more visitors toits shores. With more flights arriving in the country and with more hotels and guest houses available, visitors have now more options to come and explore the islands.
For the festive season, an increase in the number of arrivals was also recorded. “December is the second biggest performing month after October for 2016 with an 8% increase compared to December the previous year,” said the chief executive of the Seychelles Tourism Board (STB), Sherin Francis.
Mrs Francis further noted that these figures are “excellent results as one of our aims is to always try to push up the occupancy of accommodation establishments in Seychelles. So increasing the numbers are as important as the other objectives”.
With these already good numbers, the work of the STB will be more challenging.
“We plan to continue on this path of growth by focusing our efforts on our major performing markets. However, we will not overlook other smaller emerging markets as well which are slowly growing and proving to be significant such as the Scandinavian, Nordics, Central and Eastern European countries and others. We plan to use the support of the airlines to grow new markets which have all of a sudden become very accessible for Seychelles. We also intend, through our strategy, to keep the mix of visitor profile, as a form of risk management. Today we have been able to successfully grow other regions and secondary markets such as the United Arab Emirates and Gulf countries, South Africa, China and India and this remains part of our strategy,” concluded Mrs Francis.
Forrás: www.nation.sc