Two ways to travel, two budgets

Mauritius knows what its visitors spend, because it asks them. Every year, in the departure lounge of Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International Airport, travellers on their way home are questioned about their stay. In 2025, 9,472 interviews covered 21,065 travellers, out of the 1,408,326 who left the island that year. The result is a portrait in figures of the Mauritian holiday, and it holds a few surprises.

Average spending per traveller over the whole stay comes to 74,200 rupees, some 3,200 rupees more than the 71,000 rupees of 2024. Per night, it is 6,600 rupees, against 6,200 rupees the previous year. The average length of stay is 11.3 nights, against 11.4 in 2024.

These amounts exclude international airfares: they describe what the stay costs, not the whole trip. And taken on their own, they are of use to no one. What makes them useful is the way they break down.

The most striking gap lies in the type of accommodation. In 2025, a traveller staying in a hotel spent an average of 93,900 rupees over the stay, or 11,700 rupees a night. A traveller staying anywhere other than a hotel spent 34,300 rupees, or 1,900 rupees a night. The first spends more than six times as much per night as the second.

The second, moreover, stays far longer. The average stay is 8.0 nights in a hotel and 17.8 nights elsewhere. The same logic holds for the way the trip is booked: 8.0 nights on a package, 13.4 nights without one, with 11,200 rupees a night for the former and 4,800 rupees a night for the latter.

The lesson is simple: there is no such thing as the average cost of a day in Mauritius. There are two very different stays that happen to share a destination. One is short, hotel-based, often bought as a package. The other is long, spent with family and friends or in rented accommodation, and far more economical by the night.

The balance between the two has shifted, too. In 2025, 67.0 per cent of travellers stayed in a hotel, against 75.4 per cent in 2024. Of the rest, 19.6 per cent stayed with friends or family, 10.9 per cent in a tourist residence and around 2.0 per cent in a guest house. The share of package trips fell from 59.5 to 38.7 per cent in a single year.

In 2025, across all travellers, accommodation accounts for 64.4 per cent of spending. Then come shopping, at 10.0 per cent; food and drink, 9.7 per cent; local transport, 5.7 per cent; excursions, 5.6 per cent; entertainment and leisure, 3.9 per cent; and other spending, 0.7 per cent.

Accommodation has fallen back from 2024, when it stood at 72.5 per cent, while food and drink has almost doubled, from 4.7 to 9.7 per cent. This shift goes hand in hand with another, in meal arrangements. In 2025, half board leads with 42.4 per cent, ahead of the arrangement with no meals, known as “free”, at 19.5 per cent, all-inclusive at 18.5 per cent, bed only at 10.3 per cent, bed and breakfast at 8.9 per cent and full board at 0.4 per cent. A year earlier, all-inclusive led by a wide margin, with 58.8 per cent.

The two trends answer each other. Those who pay for fewer meals at the hotel pay for more outside it: in the space of a year, visitors to Mauritius have left the hotel dining room to sit down at other tables.

These figures are not prices. An average spend of 6,600 rupees a night predicts neither the price of a room, nor that of a meal, nor that of a journey. It blends the half-board guest in a beach hotel with the visitor spending three weeks with family, and it truly resembles neither.

What they do offer, on the other hand, is valuable and rare: a sense of the order of magnitude in which visitors stand, of where their money goes, and of how far apart the two ways of travelling lie. To draw up a budget, then, it is better to start from the type of trip than from the overall average. A hotel stay compares with the 11,700 rupees a night of travellers staying in hotels; a stay in rented accommodation or with family, with the 1,900 rupees of those staying elsewhere. Between the two, everything is a matter of choice: the meal plan, the number of meals taken out, the share set aside for excursions and shopping.