Convention Bureau bullish on giant Indian corporates, religious tourism

Ravi LADDUWAHETTY

The Sri Lanka Convention Bureau has mapped out strategies of simultaneously promoting Indian arrivals successfully through MICE tourism via the gigantic Indian corporate market while successfully developing and promoting religious tourism.

A top rung team of 650 private sector executives from a New -Delhi based American pharmaceutical company- Max New York will be arriving in Colombo for a corporate conference on January 23, while there is also currently a group of 200 Swamis and devotees housed at Hotel Taj Samudra who have come for Ramayana excursions, visiting sites both in Colombo and the outstations.

“There is unlimited potential for business in this segment of the market where there are around 50,000 arrivals currently. We are confident that these numbers will substantially increase in the future with visas on arrivals and the Indian tourists being aware of positive conditions and backdrop here”, Sri Lanka Convention Bureau Chairman Prema Cooray told Daily News Business last night.

Sri Lanka Convention Bureau General Manager Vipula Wanigasekera said that the Indian corporate and religious sectors were upbeat on arriving in Sri Lanka for events and there was a multitude of countrywide top rung Indian multinational corporates- IBM, Johnson and Johnson, ICICI Bank, Deutshe Bank among a host of others and some top trade chambers from Goa, Malabar, Bangalore and New Delhi, upbeat about hotels and leisure opportunities here.

Cooray said that the present success was based on the series of promotions that it had done in the Indian cities of Bangalore, Hyderabad and Guragon adjacent to New Delhi last year, the latter of which coincided with the Confederation of Indian Industry Summit with whom the Bureau partnered for the event.

In this context, a team headed by Cooray will be in Bombay from January 18 to 23 to promote Ramayana tourism for which a large number of Indians are passionate and ecstatic about. Sri Lanka has 52 Ramayana sites and devotion and interest has been evinced among Indian tourists with the current 200 member delegation having visited 14 of them, Wanigasekera said.

Cooray said that of the Rs. 1 billion which has been collected from the Tourism CESS, over 70 per cent has been channelled for promotions which should also bring positive results for 2009.