Sri Lanka Tourism taps high potential Czech Republic market

The Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau has selected a key market in Central Europe, Czech Republic to be the catalyst in driving the quality traveller as predicted by the UNWTO trends of tourism announced recently.

Managing Director Milanka Gajanayake meeting with airline partnerIn this regard, the much acclaimed key travel and tourism fair branded Holiday World Travel Fair staged in Prague was selected to be used to reach Central European segment of business by the Sri Lankan Tourism Promotion Bureau, said Chairman Rohantha Athukorala.

“We also want t o test digital marketing i n t his market where by using tools like trip advisor analytics, we can find the people who have researched Sri Lanka as a t ourism destination and how we can track them to be linked to the private sector business. This is the newest form of destination marketing that Sri Lanka is challenged with. We have no option but move with the global trends as we must note that the world market is very competitive and the company that is closest to the consumer gets the booking,” Athukorala added.

Sri Lanka Tourism contingent was represented by Managing Director of SLTPB Milanka Gajanayake and Market Head of Czech Republic Jagath Perera. The Major travel companies in Sri Lanka like Exotic Holidays International, Deluxe Vacations (Pvt) Ltd, Jetwing Travels and Raffles Leisure (Pvt) Ltd participated for this year’s show with a single-minded idea on how we can convince people of Czech Republic to travel to Sri Lanka.

The Sri Lankan delegation had a hard sell approach to the trade and an absolute consumer end demand generating discussions with top tour operators of Czech Republic. Some of the discussions centred around commencing charter flights to Sri Lanka whilst some said let’s keep innovating new marketing campaigns, so that with that direction Sri Lanka will benefit.

Czech market generates nearly 12,000 tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka annually and has the potential to be twenty thousand this year stressed Chairman Athukorala. Holiday World is a unique outlet where one can access with all possible features related to the tourism package trips and getting into a valet of a typical traveller where multiple countries are visited like Maldives and Sri Lanka.

The latest trends reveal that there is growth in the number of visitors attending the fair every year and the conversions from sales leads is a good ROI based evaluation that we are in the process of finalizing together with the bid proposal.

Attendees include hospitality and leisure industries with an higec tighten interest by travel trade members, business travel decision makers, leisure and holiday travelers, travel trade members, and cooperate and business travel decision makers and travel planners. Sri Lanka Tourism visions is to develop the Czech Republic Market which will lead to visitor journalists programmes and many other creative ways to reach the digital consumer commented Athukorala.

Source ; http://epaper.dailymirror.lk/epaper/viewer.aspx

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