Bednights, capacity and receipts · monthly since 1988 · Maldives Monetary Authority
More beds, shorter stays,
dearer nights.
Arrivals are the number everyone quotes, but the industry is really measured in bednights: how many the country can sell, how many it actually sells, what each one earns and what the state takes from it. All of it is published monthly, and has been since 1988.
The beds are multiplying faster than the guests
Since 2010 the country has added enough beds to sell 15.0m more bednights a year, and sold 7.7m more. Capacity grew 173%, nights sold grew 129%, and the share of available beds actually occupied fell from 69.4% to 58.1%.
8.6m in 2010
6.0m in 2010
-11.2 points lower than 2010
capacity less nights sold, in a single year
Bednights available and bednights sold, every year since 1988
The shaded band between the two lines is unsold capacity — beds that existed and stayed empty. It has widened every decade: the industry has never been fuller than it was in the 1990s, and each expansion has been absorbed more slowly than the last.
Share of available beds that were occupied
Bednights sold as a percentage of bednights available, by year. This is an annual average of MMA's own monthly occupancy measure applied to the whole registered estate — it includes beds in properties that were open but empty, which is what makes it a supply-and-demand reading rather than a trading statistic.
The average stay has lost 3.6 nights
Divide bednights sold by tourists arrived and you get the nights an average visitor buys: 9.67 in 1988, 6.11 in 2025. Arrivals hit a record in the same year the stay hit its modern low — the growth is coming from more people, each staying less time.
9.67 in 1988
9.67 in 1988 — the fall is here
nights per arrival, over the same period
if guesthouse nights were taken out entirely
Nights sold per tourist arrival, and who sells them
The bands stack to the line above them, exactly. Arrivals are published by nationality but never by the kind of place people stay in, so no official source gives a resort guest's own length of stay — what it does give is each segment's nights sold divided by all arrivals, and because the segments add up to total bednights, these components add up to the overall figure with nothing left over. Read that way the answer is unambiguous: the resort band has shrunk by 4.79 nights while the guesthouse band has grown by 0.98. Guesthouses are not pulling the average down — they are holding it up.
The average stay on its own
Total bednights divided by total arrivals, by year. The 2020–22 hump is real but not a trend: with borders reopening, the visitors who came stayed far longer than usual, and the series returns to its path as normal travel resumes.
944 guesthouses against 179 resorts
The guesthouse was legalised on inhabited islands in 2009, and the count has run ahead of resorts ever since — though a guesthouse is a handful of rooms and a resort is a whole island, so the bednight shares are nothing like the property counts. Guesthouses took 16.1% of the nights sold in 2025, against 0.5% in 2010.
94.3% in 2010
from 0.5% — the fastest-growing segment
against 179 resorts
twelve-month average, latest reading
Share of bednights sold, by kind of property
Each segment's nights as a percentage of all nights sold. Guesthouse bednights are only published from 2010, which is the year after the rules changed — before that the segment did not legally exist in any size worth counting.
Occupancy by kind of property
MMA's own occupancy rate for each segment, smoothed to a twelve-month average because the monthly figure swings by tens of points between the high season and the monsoon. Resorts run consistently fuller than the guesthouses and city hotels that have grown up around them.
US$ 406 for every night sold
Travel receipts divided by bednights sold gives what the country earns per occupied bed per night: US$ 297 in 2011, US$ 406 in 2025. Per visitor the rise is steeper still, because each visitor now buys fewer nights at a higher price.
US$ 297 in 2011
across 14 years, not adjusted for inflation
+19% since 2011
what tourism earned the country that year
Revenue per bednight and per arrival
Travel receipts are the balance-of-payments measure of what visitors spend in the country — room, food, excursions, transfers — not a hotel room rate, and not adjusted for inflation. Divided by nights sold it is the closest published equivalent to a national revenue-per-occupied-night; divided by arrivals it is what the average visitor is worth on the whole trip. The gap between the two lines widening is the shortening stay showing up in money.
MVR 108.2 billion since 2017
Five revenue lines fall directly on the industry: tourism GST, resort land rent, green tax, the airport service charge and the airport development fee. Together they raised MVR 19,133 million in 2025 — Tourism GST alone accounts for the largest share.
the five tourism-specific lines, added up
to Jul 2026
Jan 2017 to Jul 2026
57% of the total in 2025
Collected each year, by revenue line
Complete calendar years only, so the current part-year is not shown next to full ones. Two of these are not paid solely by tourists: the airport service charge and the development fee are levied on departing passengers, Maldivians included, and green tax is charged per night in guesthouses as well as resorts. They are counted here because the industry collects and remits them, but the total is best read as "revenue the state draws from travel and tourism" rather than "tax paid by tourists".
Why these five and not the whole budget. MMA publishes each of them as its own monthly series from Jan 2017, which is what makes them addable — the annual equivalents of two lines stop in 2021, and summing those would have quietly understated every year after it. Corporate income tax paid by resort operators, import duty on everything a resort brings in, and the lease premiums paid when an island is first awarded are all real contributions from tourism that are not counted here, because they are not published as separate tourism lines. The total is therefore a floor, not the industry’s full fiscal footprint.