Why Sri Lanka Needs to Tell the World It’s Open for Tourism

25.08.2023 - 13:58 / skift.com / Peden Doma Bhutia

Having battled political instability and economic crisis, a resilient tourism industry in Sri Lanka now waits for the government to do its bit to communicate to the world that the country is open to tourists.

But not exactly in the critical manner that was deployed by Sri Lankan Tourism Minister Harin Fernando at the recent ITB Berlin conference, where he called Maldives “boring,” without much to offer to tourists, compared to Sri Lanka.

"Visit Sri Lanka, You will not regret" Sri Lankan Tourism Minister @fernandoharin's message to German tourists at ITB, Berlin pic.twitter.com/u5mCpkzrCl

Sri Lanka’s last real tourism promotion campaign was 16 years ago.

Through March 13, Sri Lanka welcomed 264,022 visitors this year, with 53,838 visitors arriving in the first 13 days of March.

The country plans to attract 1.55 million visitors in 2023, a target which many feel isn’t a particularly high number given the capacity and potential of the destination.

Rocked by a series of bomb blasts in 2019, Sri Lanka welcomed a little less than 2 million tourists that year, 18 percent lower than its 2018 arrivals of 2.3 million tourists.

Last year from April onwards, the country witnessed a spate of anti-government protests against worsening shortages of food, fuel and medicines and declaration of a state of emergency, in what is said to be the worst economic crisis in the country.

While business has returned in 2023, Malik Fernando managing director of Sri Lanka-based luxury hotel collection Resplendent Ceylon, rued that the country’s inability to market itself has ensured that the number of tourists and the spend are still way lower than usual.

Sri Lanka’s usual core market over the winter season is Europe with longer stays and higher spend.

However, as European travelers are more sensitive to the negative press that the destination received last year, Fernando said the state promotion agency should’ve done more to communicate the return to normalcy.

“Sri Lanka’s last global promotion campaign was in 2007,” Fernando said, while adding that a comprehensive consumer campaign, which was painstakingly finalized during 2021, was then again shelved.

“Since then, the focus has reverted to age-old trade shows without awareness of the need for consumer engagement,” he added.

While the tourism industry in Sri Lanka was the first to be affected by the pandemic and last year’s economic crisis, Gayangi Wirasinha, managing director of Abercrombie & Kent Sri Lanka, said the industry was also the first to recover.

A recovery message that Fernando thinks the country hasn’t been able to communicate as travellers are unaware that normalcy returned as far back as July 2022.

“In Sri Lanka, the tourism sector is predominately driven by