The intensity of a Gibbs point process is usually an intractable function of the model parameters. For repulsive pairwise interaction point processes, this intensity can be expressed as the Laplace transform of some particular function. Baddeley and Nair (2012) developped the Poisson-saddlepoint approximation which consists, for basic models, in calculating this Laplace transform with respect to a homogeneous Poisson point process. In this paper, we develop an approximation which consists in calculating the same Laplace transform with respect to a specific determinantal point process. This new approximation is efficiently implemented and turns out to be more accurate than the Poisson-saddlepoint approximation, as demonstrated by some numerical examples.