Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has shot down a proposal mooted by a section of the tourism industry for one-to-one promotions to be carried out jointly involving state and tour operator funding. The idea is to conduct promotions that would involve marketing the destination with only a few specific tour operators in the markets that generate [...]

The Sunday Times Sri Lanka

PM says no to one-to-one marketing idea

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Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has shot down a proposal mooted by a section of the tourism industry for one-to-one promotions to be carried out jointly involving state and tour operator funding.

The idea is to conduct promotions that would involve marketing the destination with only a few specific tour operators in the markets that generate numbers only from their clients in that market. This was raised during a meeting with the Premier on Tuesdy which was shot down as being not a viable option and on the other hand he insisted there should be country-based promotions only, industry officials present at the meeting said.

A meeting at the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau (SLTPB) had also discussed this issue with the aim of creating demand and promoting the country to consumers from tourism generating markets, they said.

In this respect, the bureau would be involved in creating awareness and building demand that would assist every tour operator to promote their individual brands to market effectively, a summary report on the meeting stated.

This sort of marketing strategy would allow tour operators to feature and promote Sri Lanka for the benefit of a few companies alone, it was stated.

The report also found that however, the one-to-one tour operator support from the state would lead to a few people taking advantage of general marketing funds and promoting only themselves leaving out the smaller companies.

Thus the other tour operators would lose their market share due to aggressive advertising done by only a few resulting in the marketing efforts of others going in vain and loss of opportunity.

The summary statement noted that it could also lead to favouritism and pave the way for malpractices.

Moreover, since every promotion was carried out in that respective country there would be no mechanism to evaluate costing and production of material, evaluate advertisements carried out or how many promotions were carried out or the numbers generated from those markets.

Sections of the industry had also noted this would lead to tour operators continuously requesting help for promotions and declining their requests could lead to misunderstandings and sometimes reduced promotions, the statement said.

In the meantime, the government has called for bids from advertising agents to be picked for the long overdue global promotional campaign.

After picking the advertising agency, the industry wants the bureau to appoint a representative or PR companies while carrying out advertising and promotions in key markets like India, UK, France, Germany, Italy and China.

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