Since the national lockdown, all you’ve been dreaming of is that moment when you could soar through open skies once more, jet-setting to your favourite destinations where the exotic sun shines bright and you lounge about sipping cocktails or mocktails till your heart’s content.
While exploring Mauritius became a heavenly reality recently with one daily flight from Johannesburg, Air Mauritius has made the dream more real and more convenient.
“Fly away in the moonlight from Cape Town and wake up to the sunrise in Mauritius,” says Air Mauritius.
Air Mauritius announced via social media on Tuesday that two weekly non-stop flights between Cape Town and Mauritius will relaunch from 16 November 2022 using its “new generation A350/A330neo aircraft.”
Departure from Cape Town will be at 10.05 pm and arrival in Mauritius the next day will be at 5.10 am.
According to BusinessTech, this announcement coincides with a resurgence of South African tourists visiting the island nation.
Mauritius’ tourism and hospitality industry, the main driver of the economy which accounted for a quarter of the island nation’s GDP was severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Global travel restrictions and Mauritius’ own stringent border policies effectively halted tourist arrivals for around two years.
But with much of the world’s travel restrictions being dropped over the past five months, Mauritius followed suit by easing a number of Covid-related restrictions in response to its vaccination campaign. As a result, the island nation has since seen a surge in foreign arrivals, especially those coming from South Africa.
South African arrivals between January and May of this year exceeded pre-pandemic levels of travel. Mauritian Tourism Promotion Agency (MTPA) reported that 33 601 South African passengers were welcomed onto the island nation.
“It is encouraging to see the arrivals numbers from South Africa to Mauritius for the first five months of 2022 rivalling those of pre-Covid 2019, and we expect this positive and upward trend to continue through the year and into 2023,” said the director of the MTPA, Arvind Bundhun, earlier this month.
This swift recovery has been helped by additional flights between the two countries through South African Airways (SAA) flight frequency expansion, and FlySafair’s route expansions in the wake of Comair’s demise.
These non-stop flights from Cape Town International Airport to Mauritius start from around R6573 for a one-way ticket. Flights from Johannesburg’s OR Tambo, during the same period, start from R5548.
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