Six million tourists travel within Sri Lanka
View(s):While more than one million foreigners visit Sri Lanka as tourists, six million Sri Lankans travel within the country as domestic tourists, a top local official said.
Dr. D.S. Jayaweera, Director General of the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority (SLTDA), told a Google event in Colombo on Thursday that the number of locals categorised as leisure travellers has risen sharply from just two million in 2008 (before the war ended).
On the sidelines of the event, he told the Business Times that the number of local travellers is measured by the number of entry tickets issued to locals at public parks and other venues like Sigiriya, the Zoo or Peradeniya Gardens. “We have done a sample survey based on this and arrived at these figures,” he said.
Other ways of measurement would be the number of guest nights at all registered hotels and guest houses by tourism authorities. The last published annual statistical report for 2012 shows that there was a ratio of
1-5 (one local traveller versus 5 foreigners) in terms of guest nights in graded and supplementary accommodation units.