Campaign to woo Indian MICE market

Ramani Kangaraarachchi

The Sri Lanka Convention Bureau will launch a major promotional campaign to attract Indian corporates for MICE market in partnership with Sri Lankan Airlines, hotels and the MICE industry next month.

This campaign in the metros in India entails road shows,sales blitz and presentations which would continue until April 2008.

Sri Lanka Convention Bureau Chairman Prema Cooray addressing the media said the MICE market is growing rapidly and the Indian outbound MICE market is expected to be over 8,000,000 out of the total 9 million outbound traffic by 2008 and Sri Lanka wishes to capture at least 10 per cent of this market within the next two years through this promotional drive.

He pointed out that Sri Lanka is ideally positioned and well connected to India and India is going to make miracles in the economic upturn in the South Asia in the future.

“Therefore an aggressive promotional campaign would be very productive and important” he said. India is the biggest market for Sri Lankan tourism as well as for MICE tourism and there is a huge untapped market that will await the Sri Lankan delegation led by Cooray.

A special package designed in a more structured manner to Indian corporates at very competitive rates has been offered, he said.

The campaign would cover five major cities namely Banglore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai approaching a minimum of 100 leading companies.

Twenty five leading Sri Lankan tour operators will join this campaign to have one to one meetings for two days, to introduce new business ventures.