With East coast opening Sri Lanka never out of season

Sanjeevi Jayasuriya

With the reopening of the East coast as a prime tourist destination in the world, Sri Lanka will never be out of season. This will not only negate the off season mentality, but will also make the East coast the newest found destination in the tourism world for those who discovered Sri Lanka during the conflict period, said President, Sri Lanka Association of Inbound Tour Operators (SLAITO) Chandra Wickramasinghe.

“We need to market the Eastern Province and upgrade infrastructure facilities. The Pasekudah resort in the East coast will be developed as an exclusive beach resort under the Government’s accelerated development program Nagenahira Navodaya by improving infrastructure facilities to set up a minimum of 700 tourist hotel rooms in the area”, he said.

The tourist industry was the most victimized during the conflict and the cost to the industry during the past 25 years is over US $ 12 billion. With terrorism eradicated, the country returned to normalcy and a window of opportunity and conducive business environment has been created for the tourism industry, he said.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared the year 2011 as a “Visit Sri Lanka Year” and Sri Lanka Tourism has launched a work plan towards increasing the annual inbound tourist traffic to the country with several events and activities.

We support the efforts of Sri Lanka Tourism towards achieving their targets, he said. “We need to have careful and effective planning in infrastructure development so as to withstand the qualitative and quantitative demand of the modern day world tourism to achieve this goal”, he said.

The main infrastructure requirement of the country at present is to have a minimum of 25,000 rooms of 3 to 5 star category, giving prominence to the nerve locations of the leisure industry.

This will bring about a huge economic boom to the country with a huge multi-faceted effect on the economy, he said.