Developing Experiential Tourism

Vipula WANIGASEKERA

The holiday makers who visited Sri Lanka in the 60s and 70 including those who took the famous Scandinavian charters, wanted one thing and that is to lie down on the beach. The beach therefore remained as the predominant attraction in Sri Lanka over rest of the locations and will continue to be so with Kalpitiya and East opening for tourism in the future.

Others argue that Sri Lanka Tourism should not over rely on the Beach when there is a substantial market for rest of the attractions. It is opined Sri Lanka should reckon the Experiential Tourism to be a key factor to compete with the region that is trying out new strategies to retain their market share in the face of global economic set back.

A wide discussion on 'Experiential Tourism' gives us much food for thought to increase the market share in the short run towards accomplishing Sri Lanka's strategic mission of hosting 2.5 million tourists by 2016. The prerequisite of 50,000 hotel rooms by this time requires selection and clearing locations and basic infrastructure development for which the plans are being drawn up and implemented.

Till then, Sri Lanka Tourism could take the full advantage of the current scenario when the country is now viewed as a new destination for those who, ignorant of facts, thought Sri Lanka was at 'war'. The conducive peaceful environment has given Sri Lanka Tourism the every opportunity for short term gains in a sustainable manner.

Experiences

Experiences are differentiating themselves from the offering of Product and Services. Products are tangible and Services are intangible. Experiences are memorable and personal hence the need to revisit existing programs and communications against mere itineraries to places. Experiential tourism engages all five senses of the visitors and is the opposite of mass tourism that traditionally focuses on package tours and vacations with low levels of personal involvement. Experiential tourism, on the other hand encourages visitors to actively participate and draws people into the local nature, culture and history. In this sense it is very personal and individual.

It is wrong to presume that Experiential tourism deals only with activity based programs. Even Nature, adventure, Eco, heritage tourism and other niche areas well fit under experiential tourism , provided the visitor achieves expectations through memorable moments.

Visitors invest their personal time and money while the provider gains an understanding of the visitors' interests and provides what is required to facilitate the opportunity for a memorable experience. The result allows a sense of personal accomplishment for the visitor.

The change from active holidays to holidays as an experience was considered a significant shift for the tourism industry world over. The service providers went into the search and implementation of participatory experience that generate new knowledge and authentic experiences.

Superior value

Those who deliver memorable customer experiences are actually offering superior value and thereby hold competitive advantages. The experiences must be completely different from their own or what they have experienced elsewhere. The analysis of what is unique to Sri Lanka is necessary for which nature, culture and heritage would play and big part.

Such analysis will enable the industry to develop ideas that could be brought into programs in consultation with the overseas partners. This also entails pre-departure trip planning to post-trip follow-up. Demonstrating export product processes, Tailoring folk cultural performances to audiences, Engaging in paddy processes through traditional methods, Gem mining, the list is long.

Human resources in the industry must have increasing skills in this area and in fact the need is already felt in institutions for creativity and innovations that can be put into practice by matching the ideas to resource capability. The curriculum on tourism management should have more emphasis on this area by providing opportunities for students to develop their creativity through case studies, group work and outdoor activities.

Active participant

Experiential tourism is a difficult subject to define but one would say it allows the tourist to be an active participant in the experience. Experiential tourism is everything visitors touch, feel, see and do and a high percentage of travellers are said to be craving for experiential tourism now more than ever.

The DMCs in Sri Lanka have so far excelled in providing this ' experience' to the visitor as they often deal with Incentive groups. Experiential Tourism can be an extension of this to many other areas that could include business visits too. All one needs is to tailor the experience from the consumer's needs and perspectives.

Sri Lanka's Tourism focus on Experiential Tourism will have direct benefits as such as low impact and high yield while it leaves in the memory of the visitor a personal, unique and individual experience for each visitor who will always guarantee another visitor to Sri Lanka.