Transfer times to hotels and resorts from the airport range from ten minutes to an hour and a half, with an average of forty minutes; packages booked through tour operators will include either group or private transfers.
Flights from Europe
Direct flights take around twelve hours from London to Mauritius with direct services available from Air Mauritius (airmauritius.com) and British Airways (ba.com). A competitively priced once-weekly Thomson’s Dreamliner flight was also launched in May 2014. Airlines flying non-direct services from London include Emirates (emirates.com), Air France (airfrance.com), Virgin Atlantic (virgin-atlantic.com), Qantas (qantas.com.au), South African Airways (flysaa.com) and Lufthansa (lufthansa.com). Flying to Mauritius from other UK airports or from Ireland involves either catching a connecting flight to London or flying via the airline’s hub city. For those departing via Paris, the Vanilla Islands Pass from Air Austral (air-austral.com) provides discounted island-hopping in the Indian Ocean between Mauritius, Réunion, Seychelles, Madagascar, Comoros and Mayotte: a minimum of four flights must be booked to qualify.
Flights from the US and Canada
There are no direct flights from the US and Canada to Mauritius; it takes around 24 hours to reach Mauritius from New York City, for example. The best options are via London or a continental European city such as Paris.
Flights from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa
Irregular flights from Perth operated by Air Mauritius (airmauritius.com) are the only direct link from Australia, taking eight hours. Direct flights from Johannesburg and Durban with Air Mauritius take four hours. Flights from New Zealand require at least one change; common routes are via South Africa or Dubai.
Air passes
Trips to Mauritius are commonly twinned with a Kenyan or South African safari and visit to Réunion Island. If you’re planning on doing this, an African Air Pass (staralliance.com) is useful: it allows four to ten discounted flights from a choice of 25 countries in the space of three months, and can be bought with any Star Alliance member ticket outside Africa. Using Air Mauritius’s network, Mauritius can also be a stopover on an RTW flight, combined with Asian destinations, from Shanghai to Singapore, and even Australia.
