Special concentration should be provided to other efforts such as marketing efforts, PR campaign, recovery plan and the promotional exhibitions in order to salvage the tourism industry in the aftermath of the Easter explosions.
Chairman, Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau (SLTPB), Kishu Gomes told the Daily News Finance that these efforts are more crucial than tourism promotional roadshows. Hence they had decided to cancel them for the moment.
“We need to spend more time, effort and resources for these activities. Roadshows are no that critical for the moment and cancelling them won’t have a big impact on the industry,” he said.
Following the Cabinet approval obtained for the implementation of the global promotional campaign and the recovery plan by J.Walter Thompson (JWT), which is the selected PR agency, Gomes said that the campaign is still being worked out as the agreement with the JWT is still been examined by the agency and a draft has been sent to the AG department for examination. “Over the next few days everything will be sorted out and by the end of this month the global promotional campaign will be put into operation,” he added. He also said that after starting the global promotional campaign, they would relook at conducting the roadshows although prior to the attacks they did not have any intention to conduct roadshows for this year. “However everything changed completely after April 21 and still we are doing our best to revive the industry,” he said.
Over the last 10 days tourist arrivals have increased up to 4,500 and the numbers keeps increasing. Accordingly the number of arrivals has been growing since June in comparison to the number of arrivals in May which was around 1,300 per day. However the number of arrivals this year is predicted to fall short of last year’s arrivals of 2.3 million. In 2018, the industry ended with 2.33 million visitors, up by 10.3 percent in comparison to 2017.
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