The future of tourism marketing would be based on online marketing said Chairman Sri Lankan Tourism Promotions Bauru, Kavan Ratnayake.
Speaking at the launch of the e-marketing platform for travelers from all around the world last Thursday in Colombo he said that in Sri Lanka too this trend is spreading.
He said that more emphasis should be given to capture business from this online screen.
Managing Director, World Travel Centre, Sudharma de Silva said that presently 25% to 30% of incoming tourists to Sri Lanka and outgoing tourists from Sri Lanka make their bookings online. “We believe these figures would be 70% online and 30% offline in about three years’ time and as such it is important to prepare ourselves to face the future demands by offering more online options.”
“This is why we introduced another innovative travel product e-marketing platform for travelers, (www.pickmyjourney.com) from all around the world and one of the specialties in this system is the availability of all travel products to the online user, be it air ticketing, worldwide hotels, worldwide tours, transport. The most important uniqueness in the system is availability of Seat –in –Coach Tours and sports tours.”
Though Seat-in-coach tours is fairly new concept in Sri Lanka these tours are operated all over the world including countries such as Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand and they are supposed to be Sri Lanka’s main competitors and nearly 50% of their tours are operated on SIC basis also due to many reasons Sri Lanka has a huge potential to develop the tourism industry by combining with sports.
Pick My Journey (PMJ) will be an essential tool in future to travelers as the concept is most likely the cloud - platform containing private and fixed holiday packages.
“The system will help to sustain and up growth the tourism industry of Sri Lanka as the concept to make a Sri Lanka a business hub in the tourism industry.”
He further said they have introduced this system to use as a tool to mitigate the risk of losing existing business and business opportunities.
Whilst targeting the individual online users, PMJ also focused on agent markets by providing special agent platform, where the agent can tailor made package according to customer need.
As the product from Sri Lanka and owned by a Sri Lankan, the product will be valuable to Sri Lanka tourism. (SS)
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