Chinese travel partners to boost Sri Lanka tourism
Outside of the big cities of China like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, most Chinese are unaware that they could vacation on an island called Sri Lanka and this needs talking about. So, travel firm Green Leaves Leisure with its Chinese partner is promoting the destination to generate, on their own, at least 10,000 tourists monthly.
Tourism Minister John Amaratunga addressing the media at the briefing held to introduce the company, said that the government has an intention of doubling or trebling the number of arrivals from China. In this respect, he endorsed companies like this that had previously brought down Chinese couples for a mass scale marriage ceremony in Sri Lanka last year to also attract the right travellers from the Far Eastern bloc to visit the island and “make Sri Lanka a second home.” The company’s Chairman Harindra Rodrigo noted that they carry out a number of programmes on promoting Sri Lanka on the Chinese television channel CCTV to lure more travellers to the country.
In addition he pointed out that they had entered into an agreement with the Chinese travel firm Yingke Travels which is a subsidiary of Vanta Field Industrial Shanghai Co. Ltd to attract 10,000 Chinese travellers per month for the next 10 years to the country starting from this month.
Yingke Travels is said to have over 12, 000 branches all over China that could carry out the necessary promotions to attract the tourists to Sri Lanka.
They hope to target visitors from high spender, mid spenders and even low spenders, it was pointed out.
Meanwhile, the company is also planning on bringing down two more groups of 50 couples each to the country to celebrate the mass wedding ceremony.
China currently has about 12 million outbound travelers per year visiting destinations worldwide and this number is being attracted more as there has been a recent trend among them to tour the world.