BETTER CONNECTIVITY HIGH ON THE MEETING AGENDA
(Posted 22nd December 2016)
Sir Anerood Jugnauth, the Prime Minister of Mauritius last week received Minister Alain St. Ange, the Seychelles Minister responsible for Tourism, Civil Aviation, Ports and Marine at his offices in Port Louis Mauritius.
Minister St. Ange and Prime Minister Jugnauth discussed extended air connectivity between Seychelles and Mauritius and the request by Seychelles to increase Air Seychelles flights to the sister island of Mauritius to seven per week, up from presently four.
Seychelles and Mauritius are both part of the Indian Ocean Vanilla Islands where twin centre holiday options especially for long haul tourism has been growing considerably in the recent years. Minister Alain St. Ange said after the meeting that the Prime Minister of Mauritius was supportive of his request but raised the need to Air Seychelles and Air Mauritius to look at the possibility of code share in their future discussions.
Other points raised was more business transactions between the two islands especially in the development of more export of Mauritius products to Seychelles and also encouraging the tourism industry of Seychelles to look at Mauritius for recruitment of needed personnel.
The meeting was attended by Mr Mungroo, a Member of the Board of Directors of Air Mauritius.
After the meeting the Seychelles Minister said that he had appreciated the meeting and would have Air Seychelles follow up with official requests for meetings to discuss code share and increase of flights. This is the second meeting between Prime Minister Jugnauth and Minister St.Ange this year.
Soon afterwards did news emerge from Mauritius that Minister St. Ange’s counterpart in the tourism portfolio Mr. Xavier-Luc Duval, had resigned his post as Minister and also his position as Deputy Prime Minister when his party left the ruling coalition. No new substantive tourism minister has been appointed as yet but the high level meeting of Minister St. Ange with the Mauritius Prime Minister gave rise to hope that the warm and friendly relations between the two island nations will continue regardless of Mr. Duval’s abrupt decision to leave government.
