Moragoda in Israel to discuss tourism

ISRAEL: Tourism Minister Milinda Moragoda arrived in Tel Aviv on Sunday for a tour of the country and meetings with officials in the Tourism Ministry. Moragoda’s visit, the first by a Sri Lankan Tourism Minister, focused on the promotion of tourism to a country which, like his own, is regularly faced by terrorism and other crises.

“Israel’s tourism industry serves as a model of successfully coping with and quickly recovering from crisis situations,” Tourism Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich said last week, “and I’m happy to contribute knowledge in this field to countries in similar situations.”

After travelling to Jerusalem, the Dead Sea and other popular tourist sites, Moragoda will spend his visit studying how Israel has marketed itself overseas, as well as the policies it’s crafted to keep the tourism industry afloat financially during periods of violence. Some 2,124 Sri Lankan tourists visited Israel last year, down slightly from 2005.

The two countries don’t have a formal tourism agreement, but Tourism Ministry officials said work was under way on a draft agreement that would allow the ministry to strengthen ties with its Sri Lankan counterpart.

Aharonovich and Moragoda are scheduled to meet in Jerusalem today.