The number of duty-free boats considered as luxury have not been defined by the authorities, and anyone can bring an old yacht and operate with this loop-hole saying it’s a luxury boat. So, the challenge is that the locals who build the boats paying duty to everything face the difficulties in selling them, as these boats brought under the luxury tag from Egypt, Greece, Thailand and Indonesia are not luxury at all. However, they make it happen and get a ticket to operate, while they sell cheaper than the local boats.

It affects a lot and becomes a major challenge. They are operating here for a few years, and going to another destination. It’s like a stranger coming into our home and breaking all our house rules. They don’t care about our future. They do whatever they want and they even don’t bother about the future of the industry, and are simply killing our business. It appears that their operation cost is cheaper than ours. But, my question is why is it cheap? I am sure they also use diesel for the engines, not seawater. However, from the internet sometimes we see their rates much cheaper than ours. So, are we missing something? Or something is going very wrong? Tax authorities should keep an eye on them.

There is no assessment of luxury! The issue of regular boats being imported in as luxury boats cannot be resolved as long as there are no standards to assess what will be deemed "luxury" for this purpose. If government introduces an assessment method and defines luxury standards, then luxury boats will not be able to come in and offer unreasonable market rates and the local businesses will be protected. As for situations where luxury boats are sold at an unreasonable market rate even after the government introduces such assessments for luxury, then this means that the foreign boats are doing this on purpose to kill the domestic market. This can be adequately covered if Maldives had a competition law that restricts such anti-competition activities. I did hear that the Ministry of Economic Development has a draft of the Competition Bill, I don't know why it is not being submitted to the Parliament for enactment. The lack of anti-competition law also affects other areas of the tourism industry, such as travel agents and destination management companies. In all other countries, local businesses are protected first before enabling foreign investments. This can be only resolved when we change our focus from GDP to GNP. ADB President spoke about this. Local DMCs or OTOs are facing difficulties connecting to foreign channel managers, so unless the government policy adequately addresses these challenges, the local future in this industry is being diminished and greatly affected. I think politicians and MPs need to pay serious attention to these issues now, by enabling the required laws which are missing, and enforcing the existing ones properly which will protect local businesses, such as the Foreign Investment Act of Maldives.

I guess there are different ways to manage it and we have to approach in those different ways.