Emirates Airline signed another agreement with a tourist authority to jointly promote travel—this time to the Indian Ocean island Mauritius.
Emirates plans to increase its current service between Dubai (DXB) and Mauritius (MRU), located east of Madagascar, from 9X-weekly to 2X-daily from June 23. The second daily flight will be operated with a Boeing 777-300ER from June 23 to June 30 before being switched to an Airbus A380 from July 1. The current service, restarted in July 2021, is operated with an A380.
The UAE carrier noted it first started serving Mauritius in 2002.
Emirates agreed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority, building “on the existing partnership between the two entities to promote tourism to Mauritius from key markets across the Emirates network,” the Gulf airline said in a statement.
“We enjoy a long-standing partnership with Mauritius and have had a fruitful association in the past,” Emirates senior VP-commercial West Africa & Indian Ocean Ahmed Khoory said, adding: “As international borders reopen and travel restrictions ease, we remain deeply committed to support initiatives that boost inbound tourism and increase leisure traffic to Mauritius.” He said the pact “enables joint initiatives [with Mauritius] to undertake tourism recovery.”
Mauritius Tourism Minister Louis Steven Obeegadoo said: “Mauritius tourism is recovering fast, and some markets are already performing better than prior to the pandemic. We therefore welcome the increase in capacity planned by Emirates and the new partnership agreement as they will provide a boost to our tourist arrivals worldwide.”
Emirates earlier this month signed a similar tourism-promotion pact with South Africa and in February inked a tourism accord with Spanish tourism institute Turespaña.