‘Super Chefs’ competition in Matale

Beyond Boundaries, the MICE arm of Eco Team, conducted a live cooking competition on the lines of the popular ‘Master Chef’ program on April 21 2013 in a popular Spice Garden in Matale.

This activity was conducted for a group of 115 incentive clients from Portugal, brought to Sri Lanka by Aitken Spence Travels.

Apart from the cooking competition, where the team was divided into 10 and cooked a chicken curry and a pot of rice, a competition was held to select the ‘Best Nosy Nose’ for each team, where participants had to identify Sri Lankan spices according to their fragrance.

Commenting on the success of event, Eco Team CEO Anuruddha Bandara said: “Beyond Boundaries is a unique and innovative outfit, always thinking outside-the-box, and we work with the Sri Lankan tour operators, adding value to their MICE programs. We, together with the Sri Lanka Conventions Bureau, help them to win bids not only going by the price but also by being innovative and different.”

He added that Beyond Boundaries offers tailor-made programmes to meet specific client needs and provides a myriad of choices to create an effective platform to deliver value-for-money, refreshingly new and inspiring team building events and activities for incentive programs.

Sri Lanka Convention Bureau General Manager Vipula Wanigasekera said: “Sri Lanka’s strength in MICE tourism is predominantly reflected in the incentive travel segment which we need to promote aggressively. Just offering tour itineraries to incentive houses will not make us look different to our competitors in spite of Sri Lanka’s diversity of locations.

We are happy that Beyond Boundaries is coming up with creative programs that create many ‘ wow’ factors with fond memories which the participants will take back home and relate to other potential incentive travellers to Sri Lanka. They have actually filled a considerable void in that area.”

Meanwhile, Aitken Spence Travels Chief Operating Officer Tikiri Ellepola said that they had won the contract amidst a heavy competition and expectations from the client were very high.

“We stretched ourselves to deliver nothing but the best for this incentive program and when we decided that some kind of novelty had to be provided during their tour, naturally we turned to the best in the industry – Beyond Boundaries. Aitken Spence bas been working with them for over a decade now and they have delivered fantastic experiences all the time. The Matale experience was not an exception; they delivered a really great experience for our clients.”

Ellepola added that the venue for the activity was selected in keeping with the sustainable tourism approach the company strongly believes in.

“We made sure that the locale community was also benefited,” he added.