Meet Claudia
Meet Claudia
I’m Claudia Win, a Belgian-Canadian entrepreneur now living in Mauritius.
I’ve always had an international life. I’ve lived in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Monaco, the United Kingdom, Israel and Canada, where I spent more than 18 years.
In 2025, I made one of my biggest moves yet: I relocated to Mauritius with my two children and my retired parents.
An international life
- Belgium
- The Netherlands
- France
- Monaco
- United Kingdom
- Israel
- Canada
- Mauritius
And there was one important detail: I had never been to Mauritius before.
With two children and two retired parents to take care of, I didn’t have the flexibility to travel back and forth beforehand to explore the island, visit properties and figure everything out in person. I organised most of our relocation from abroad and made the leap without having experienced Mauritius for myself.
So I know exactly what it feels like to prepare for a life here from thousands of kilometres away.
Technology and AI, including ChatGPT, helped me enormously throughout the process. But I also quickly discovered their limits.
On an island like Mauritius, information can change, be incomplete or simply not reflect what is actually happening on the ground. AI can give you a starting point, but it cannot always tell you what a neighbourhood really feels like, whether the information you found is still accurate, what something should realistically cost, or the practical details of everyday life.
And I learned some of those lessons the expensive way.
There is another reality when you are arriving from abroad: you don’t yet know the local prices, habits, processes or ways of doing things. What may seem normal to you may not actually be normal locally. Prices and conditions can also vary depending on who you are dealing with and how familiar you are with the market.
That can matter when choosing a property, negotiating a service or simply organising everyday life.
This is also why I believe there is real value in having someone on the ground who has experienced Mauritius from an expatriate’s perspective — someone who understands both what you are expecting from abroad and how things actually work once you are here.
When you’re looking for a Plan B, you don’t necessarily have months to travel back and forth, explore every option and work everything out by yourself. Sometimes you need to make important decisions from a distance.
And that’s when having someone you can trust on the ground can make a real difference.
Looking back, one of my biggest challenges was that there was no single person I could turn to for all the questions I had — including the small, practical ones that can make a huge difference when you’re planning a life from abroad.
Where should we live based on the children’s schools? What would daily life actually look like? What about healthcare, medication, insurance, banking, residency or simply knowing where to go when we needed something?
I could find pieces of information in different places, but I didn’t have someone on the ground who could look at our situation as a whole, answer those practical questions and help me connect the dots.
Once I arrived, I also discovered things I simply couldn’t have known from abroad — questions I hadn’t thought to ask, details I couldn’t see online and decisions I would have made differently with the right information.
If I had had access to someone offering the kind of support I provide today, I would have hired them immediately.
It would have saved me an enormous amount of time, uncertainty and some expensive mistakes.
My professional background is in marketing, communication and business development. I’ve always been good at understanding what people are trying to achieve, finding the right people and making the right connections.
That professional experience, combined with my own relocation experience, is what led me to create WIN Mauritius.
Today, my role is to give you what I wish I had had: someone on the ground who understands the bigger picture, helps you ask the questions you may not even know to ask yet, connects you with the appropriate agents, developers and professionals, and helps you see what you simply can’t see from abroad.
Because a Plan B isn’t just something you put on paper.
It’s a life you may actually need to live one day.
I’m not here to sell you Mauritius.
I’m here to help you understand whether Mauritius is the right Plan B for you — and if it is, help you put it in place with the right information, the right connections and someone you can rely on on the ground.
Claudia Win
Founder, WIN Mauritius
Belgian · Canadian · Based in Mauritius
English · Français