“Vanilla Islands”: the Indian Ocean islands becoming a single tourist destination

The project of gathering Madagascar, the Comoros, the Seychelles and La Reunion to become a single tourist space called, ‘The Vanilla Islands”, has been in a gestation phase for a long time among professionals in tourism. This time, the project is about to be realized because all of the tourist operators in the Indian Ocean have met together on September, 16 in a tourist workshop in Mauritius to decide about the presentation and promotion of the “Vanilla Islands” project. During that workshop, tourist operators in the Indian Ocean have agreed that the “Vanilla Islands” project is going to be presented to the general public during the International Tourism Show ‘Top Resa’ which is held in Paris from September, 21 to 24, 2010.

The main target of the project is that, in the future, when tourists come to one of the islands of the Indian Ocean, they would say, “Let’s visit the Indian Ocean, like they would say, let’s visit the Caribbean or the West Indies”. The “Vanilla Islands” project would make possible the combination of each island’s specificity into a single tourist destination, thus, allowing tourist operators to promote organized trip having a wide variety of activities including surfing, swimming, sunbathing, hiking, sports, discovery trip and many others. Concerning the administrative procedure related to the establishment of the project, its organizers stated that talks with international authority about the agreement of the project are underway.