Dollar spending per night by a tourist in Sri Lanka is US $ 180, demonstrating an improvement during the recent past
Sri Lanka tourism industry should move away from merely targeting large visitor volumes, and strive to attract the high-spending segment who stay longer periods, according to a top global travel and tourism professional.
Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) Chief Executive Officer Martin J Craigs believes that measurements based on largest tourist arrivals could be misleading. “That isn’t your ultimate aspiration. Your aspiration is to get highpaying international tourists who will stay longer,” he said. Sri Lanka Tourism counts a person who at least stays single night in the country (but not exceeding 12-months) as a tourist, based on the United Nations standard of defining a tourist. Sri Lanka boasts of double digit growths in arrival figures every month on a Year-onYe a r ( Yo Y ) basis. During the first 7-months, tourist arrivals to the country has grown by 24.7 percent (YoY) to 861, 324 while India becoming the single largest market with more than 15 percent or 133,515 (up 24.5 percent YoY) arrivals.
On average, a tourist stays between eight to ten days (tourist nights) in Sri Lanka.
Based on the 7-months tourism earnings of US $ 1.24 billion released just last week by the Central Bank, dollar spending per night by a tourist in Sri Lanka is US $ 180, demonstrating an improvement during the recent past.
In recent times, Sri Lanka Tourism has been striving hard to tap the huge Chinese outbound tourism market to attract the high spending Chinese travelers through various campaigns. During the first 7-months in 2014 alone, Chinese arrivals to Sri Lanka soared by as much as 144 percent YoY to 67,408.
Speaking at the PATA Sri Lanka Chapter Annual General Meeting held last week, Craigs said Australia as a tourist destination ranked 37, based on arrivals but they are ranked 7th based on overall tourist spending and more importantly they are the first in the world for highest spend per tourist, per day figure. However a senior tourism professional and a past President of the Tourist Hotels Association of Sri Lanka, Srilal Miththapala doubts whether all these arrival figures in Sri Lanka translate in to high spenders because of the ‘diaspora factor’ which constitute of at least 15-20 percent of overall arrival figures.
“These ‘tourists’, recorded by the Department of Emigration, are foreign passport holders, but Sri Lankan Expatriates returning to visit friends and relatives who would normally not patronize hotels, but stay with ‘friends and relatives,” he said last year.
Post-conflict Sri Lanka has seen a huge jump in tourist arrival numbers which even dipped to below 450,000 during the conflict, but still the largest arrivals are from the traditional markets such as United Kingdom and Western Europe.
Sri Lanka Tourism targets at least 1.5 million tourist arrivals this year and 2.5 million in 2016. Pic by : Pradeep Dilrukshana
Sri Lanka Travel Feneteko