REUNION DROPS VISA REQUIREMENTS FOR CHINESE AND INDIAN VISITORS
(Posted 08th July 2014)
Ile de la Reunion, a French island territory in the deep of the Indian Ocean, has announced the easing of Visa requirements for tourist and business visitors from China and India. A formal government notice published last Saturday confirmed what the grapevine had been whispering about, that in order to boost tourist traffic to the island has the French government in Paris consented to significantly reduce requirements for Chinese and Indian citizens flying to Reunion as tourists.
The Visa waiver applies for visitors staying less than 15 days and is in line with a previous such action, which saw South African citizens exempted from the need of applying for a Visa, a move which saw tourist numbers jump by over a third within months of the announcement.
Credited with the decision are the island’s President of the Regional Council Mr. Didier Robert, Senator Mrs. Jacqueline Farreyrol and the President of Ile de la Reunion Tourisme Mr. Patrick Serveaux who relentlessly lobbied for the exemptions.
Reunion, a founder member of the Vanilla Island group if islands, has in recent years successfully diversified tourism arrivals from the French mainland to a number of other source markets, including South Africa and has identified China and India as emerging market with a big potential to boost visitor numbers. The island’s home airline, Air Austral, has through the introduction of an airpass to the other Vanilla Islands of Seychelles, Mayotte, Comoros, Madagascar and Mauritius also made it more attractive to visit not just Reunion but also other islands, as long as travelers have arrived on an Air Austral long haul flight from either Europe, India or Thailand to where the airline presently flies.
This development is in stark contrast to the tit for tat action by some African countries, which seem hellbent to make travel for tourism and trade between their countries as difficult as possible, leaving their respective tourism stakeholders reeling from the hammerblows of sharply reduced visitors numbers as a result. Kudos therefore go to Reunion for making travel into a European Union territory easier and mega barbs for those African countries which continue to fail the people of Africa through prohibitive measures – with the exception of Rwanda, aka The Land of a Thousand Hills, which since early last year grants every citizen of an African Union member country coming to the country a visitor pass / Visa on arrival.
