Crisis-Ridden Sri Lanka Tourism Aims to Regain Momentum

Image collected
Nearly a year on after a series of terrorist attacks targeting churches and luxury hotels in the administrative centre city Colombo brought Sri Lanka to its knees, the country’s tourism industry is once more getting back through to its feet to reestablish itself as a desired destination.

Recent months have brought encouraging signs for Sri Lanka tourism stakeholders, not only in the swift recovery of foreign visitor numbers back to the united states, but also unprecedented opportunities that arose in the wake of the unfortunate bomb attacks last April.

The Easter Sunday bombs came at a time when Sri Lanka’s nascent tourism sector was “just getting up to cruising speed”, said Miguel Cunat, chief experience officer at The Fabulous Getaway, a Colombo-based travel company, lamenting the loss of positive momentum in tourism branding when the united states suffered a 70 percent plunge in tourist arrivals in the weeks following the attacks.

However the bomb attacks, interestingly, also spurred a spike browsing traffic for Sri Lanka. “Global travelers generally have low knowing of Sri Lanka, but we received serious publicity from the bombing when ‘Where is Sri Lanka’ became among the top trending search conditions for Google’s annual Year browsing roundup,” said Vickum Nawagamuwage, founder and CEO of Santani Resort and Spa, an extravagance wellness resort in Kandy.

“As they say, there’s nothing beats bad publicity. [The bombs] really put Sri Lanka on the map,” Nawagamuwage remarked. Savvy travel marketers have been quick to tap the interest spike in the island nation by leveraging digital marketing channels in their recovery strategies, he noted.

Sri Lanka’s unexpected tourism downturn also gave the united states an opportunity to “tidy up things and put the house in order,” said KK Collection Executive Director Mario Stubbs. One example, according to him, may be the cessation of dismal performers, typically small guesthouses in the oversupplied budget accommodations sector, in the months following the bombings.

PUTTING THE HOUSE IN ORDER
What has gotten industry players on the island nation most excited may be the greater sense of collaboration between your public and private sectors as the united states turned the corner from crisis to recovery, said Cunat.

Since coming into power last November, new President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has recognized tourism as an integral sector to revive Sri Lanka’s fragile economy, according to local media reports, and has stressed the importance of developing new places of interest and creating an efficient promotional mechanism to put Sri Lanka back on the global travel map.

Rajapaksa’s presidency is igniting hopes among private companies that the Sri Lankan government is finally picking up the slack to lead the country’s tourism marketing efforts in a cohesive, strategic manner.

Notably, Rajapaksa has appointed Kimarli Fernando, who has already established an illustrious career in the private sector including stints in Standard Chartered and Deutsche Bank, to head the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority, Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau, and Sri Lanka Convention Bureau as chairperson.

Foremost tasks in her new tourism chief role, Fernando told Skift, is to kick-start the merging of these tourism bodies right into a single agency with her at the helm as chair. “These three institutions were previously employed in silos because their chairpersons and board members were different,” she said. That may no longer be the case, she stressed.

Under her charge, Fernando said that the nation’s top tourism marketing body will now embody “a way of thinking that’s not the same as five, a decade back,” with a greater focus on efficiency and inter-ministerial collaboration in issues pertaining to wildlife, cultural, and conservation issues.

MARKET SEGMENTATION
Nawagamuwage, however, warned that Sri Lanka tourism’s mass marketing approach no more works amid intensifying competition in the region, adding that the country’s tourism marketing campaigns to date were “too generic and very much Europe focused even while the latter is declining [in global market share].”

“That is a mismatch in strategy and position of Sri Lanka, [the authorities] have to understand the sub-products of Sri Lanka and how to create specific messages for different markets,” Nawagamuwage remarked.

Fernando, like others in the private sector, believed that the hitherto promotion of Sri Lanka as simply a sun, sea, and sand destination no more cuts it in a competitive global tourism sector where sustainable and responsible travel experience are gaining steam.

Sri Lanka Tourism’s five-year tourism marketing plan, that was approved at the first board meeting in January, will finally deliver the “consistency” that the private sector has been clamoring for, according to Fernando.

On the global front, Sri Lanka Tourism’s online marketing strategy includes differentiating the global target markets into tier one and tier two priority countries, although some 4,900 places has been determined and promoted to reflect the real diversity of the country’s tourism assets.

While admitting that having less concerted action and efforts in the general public sector was a hindrance previously, Fernando cautioned against the thinking that the onus for change falls solely on the federal government.

“The private sector still has work to accomplish too. They should move away from price-based to value-based encounters to show what Sri Lanka provides. The whole gamut of private sector players should obtain game up to include value [to encounters in the country].”

Everyone must improve. You will be one star yet give a good experience,” she stressed.

Khiri Travel Sri Lanka General Manager Petra Ismail agreed that private companies still have to improve their value proposition to overcome the perception of Sri Lanka as a pricey destination.

A larger attention on sustainability issues, including animals and human rights, is crucial to Sri Lanka long-term tourism success, while bad practices in elephant welfare and whale watching tours have to be abolished, she added.

“We’re a little island so we ought to be clear what we desire to be in the next 10 years,” Ismail added. “We should aim more for quality than quantity, and target persons who really want to experience Sri Lanka the correct way.”

HIGH HOPES
With the positive momentum that Sri Lanka tourism is currently gaining, KK Collection’s Stubbs is optimistic that the fast-developing Sri Lankan economy will reverse the country’s brain drain and attract human capital back to the country’s tourism sector.

“There is a huge pool of hospitality finance persons in Maldives and the center East, aswell as in London, the U.S., and India,” he remarked. “But with several big tech companies basing their back-end operations in Sri Lanka, and that big hotel brands like Hilton and Shangri-La are actually entering the united states, these will indirectly entice hospitality talent another after their stints overseas.”

Against a backdrop of a widening spread of the coronavirus globally, Stubbs thinks Sri Lanka do not need to be unduly worried whether or not the country, which includes been relatively unaffected by the outbreak until recent weeks, saw a 17 percent slump in tourist arrivals in February because of the Covid-19 outbreak.

The united states, no stranger to crises, will certainly pick its way up if the coronavirus thwarts its current recovery trajectory, he contended.

“Sri Lanka tourism always had the potential but never got it right - there’s always someone pushing it down when it tries to swim and appear for air. But a positive message comes through each time from each crisis,” he said. “Sri Lanka has that armory.” 
Source: https://skift.com

Tags :

Share this news on:

Previous Story

Trending Topics

Archive