Financial Times - Fill existing hotel rooms before expanding

A top European travel operator said last week that Sri Lanka needs to fill its existing hotel rooms before expanding capacity in line with anticipated arrivals and targets in coming years.

“You first need to fill the current rooms before thinking of expanding,” said Francis Torrilla, director at Kuoni Travel Ltd, UK responding to comments by Tourism Secretary Dr P. Ramanujam, during a seminar on responsible tourism in Colombo last week.

The seminar was organized by the Responsible Tourism Partnership (RTP), Sri Lanka and the Travel Foundation of UK focusing on promoting responsible tourism in the country.

The tourism secretary spoke in detail about a 10-year strategy for the industry where he said the target was to attract 1.5 million tourists by 2015 from 600,000 now, while increasing the number of rooms to fill the expected increase in arrivals.

He said there were two scenarios planned – during war and peace. If the war continues – the strategy provides for effective management, travel advisories, intensive marketing and promotion and strengthening embassy (Sri Lankan) involvement. In case of a no war scenario, the strategy provides for consistent marketing and other areas.

On crisis management issues, the strategy discusses natural disasters, tourism-related crimes, introducing advanced warning systems and reinforcing the tourist police.

Kuoni’s Torrillo said that Sri Lanka has been slow to recover from the tsunami compared to Thailand and the Maldives. In 2005, Sri Lanka was number 4 on the list of Kuoni clients and that has dropped to number 7 in 2006 and number 6 in 2007 (estimate).

He said there was more pro-active, post tsunami marketing in the Maldives than Sri Lanka and spoke of new products. “You need to find a new angle to market the Sri Lankan product. For instance, Sri Lanka could be an ideal, long-haul destination for responsible tourism,” Torrillo said.

Kuoni, he said, had joined UK’s Travel Foundation and was championing responsible tourism and in the agency’s Travel & Charity programme, tourists visiting Thailand would spent some part of their holiday to read books to old people. “For the visitors, they get a good holiday and have the ‘feel good’ factor by doing something good,” he said.

Renton de Alwis, a former Tourist Board chairman and an RTP director, said the face of tourism was changing and so was the way the business was managed and handled. For example, he said travel agents in Sri Lanka’s shouldn’t worry too much about airlines offering travel packages and taking over their business as this has already happened in many parts of the world.

“We have to grow with the trends; travel agents should now become travel consultants,” he said adding that tourism for elderly people was a good area to promote where Sri Lanka can provide care-giving services. “We could provide migrant workers jobs here as care givers,” he said.