Sri Lanka Tourism Awards in May:

'Country needs more focus on MICE travel'

Charumini DE SILVA

The Sri Lanka Tourism Awards will be held for the fourth consecutive year, on May 27.

This year under 10 categories 53 awards will be offered to pay tribute to organizations and individuals for their contribution towards the strengthening and empowering of Sri Lanka's tourism industry.

Speaking at the media briefing held on Tuesday Sri Lanka Tourism Actg. Director General Vipula Wanigasekera said that Sri Lanka needs to focus more on Meetings, Incentive travel, Conferences and Exhibitions (MICE) tourism as the MICE tourist is an up market visitor, who spends three to four times over the average holidaymaker.

The MICE industry involves many support services generating a considerable amount of direct and indirect employment and MICE travel encourages repeat holiday visits and other investments, transactions, not necessarily relevant to tourism.

"Apart from the numbers and figures of the growth of the industry; it is essential to attract long-stay and up market travellers.

The promotion activities should continue as we are still benefiting from peace dividends and many people did not know about Sri Lanka until the country achieved peace", he said. Wanigasekera said "Sri Lanka needs to create interest and awareness among travellers around the world".

Tourist Hotels Association of Sri Lanka President, Anura Lokuhetti said this award ceremony will help to enhance the product and it is timely.

Creating sufficient awareness for these unsung heroes in the tourism industry will encourage them. He said "This year we could expect a total number of 800,000 tourists if this growth momentum continues. At present, Sri Lanka has around 15,000 formal rooms and 7,000 rooms informal, which accounts for a total of 22,000 rooms.

With this capacity we could cater to around 900,000 travellers. However, it is important to build capacity to cater to this increasing demand."

"The coming summer season will definitely be better than last year's summer," Lokuhetti said.

Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority Product Development and Events, Director Upali De Silva said over 100 applications have been received for the 53 awards and that they are quite satisfied.

This year the award structure is revamped to create more transparency and depth in certain sectors, he said.