New Sri Lanka tourism chief, new spirits – launches new business model

The Sri Lanka Tourism Promotions Bureau Chief, Dr. Rohantha Athukorala, voiced at the inauguration of the Sri Lankan Pavilion on day one of the premier travel and tourism exhibition – IBT in Berlin – that we must not just play lip service to the ethos private-public partnership in the tourism industry but really work on it on a day-to-day basis.

“On the advice of the Minister of Tourism, we are launching a new business model where apart from the short- and medium-term tourism strategy that has been agreed by the Ministry and the Board of Directors, a monthly partnership model will be done to play as a policy,” he said.

The monthly meeting will be initially at the tourism industry level where in each focus market – India, the UK, China, Germany, France, and Italy – the top private-public sector stakeholders will analyze the visitor arrivals of the last month and the bookings for the next three months, and then the agreement on the promotional support in the near future with the tweaking will be discussed and agreed upon for activation, said Athukorala. This will give a great flexibility to understand the changes in the market place and what responses we need to have from Sri Lanka, he said. Dr. Athukorala headed the same mechanism as the first Executive Director of the National Council for Economic Development (NCED), and he said this best practice will now be modeled to the tourism industry for greater engagement and institutionalization of the working arrangement.

At the second level, he said they will have a national meeting between the pivotal brand of the Sri Lanka development model between Sri Lanka tourism, the Tea Board promotional arm, and Sri Lankan Airlines, together with the Sri Lanka Export Development Board so that synergies can be worked out for stronger brand promotions at a country level. This will be a high-level meeting where the overall promotional budget will exceed a 10-15 billion rupees. Once the structure is in play, we will link to the national policy landing unit of the country just like the global best practices in Singapore and Malaysia, voiced Athukoarala.