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A leading digital marketing agency’s Chief Executive Officer recently explained on Twitter how their campaign managed to make one 5-star hotel client consistently become ranked No.1 on listings of one of the world’s largest online travel agencies. In doing so, he also revealed how completely out of touch Sri Lanka’s tourism authorities had been on reaching out and encouraging tourists to visit the country.

The hotel had been doing great after Sri Lanka came out of COVID-19 in September 2021, but things descended into chaos in March last year when the economic crisis and large scale protests hit. Mass cancellations of bookings followed. Few, if anyone, wanted to visit Sri Lanka.

After things somewhat stabilised in August, they restarted their usual campaigns but barely got a booking.

“Although from the inside, we knew that the situation was stabilising with no more fuel queues, power interruptions largely minimised, and no more violent protests, foreigners simply did not know this,” he explained.

As such, they looked into the campaigns conducted by Sri Lanka Tourism. The expectation was that they were proudly showcasing how the country was returning to normal, with no more fuel queues, no more protests, and showing that almost all star class hotels had uninterrupted power.

The authority however, was doing none of that.

“It still kept promoting the same rhetoric of the Sigiriya rock, the Yala park, and the Fort clock tower.”

There was no relevance to what was going on, and it just showed how slow the tourism authorities were to adapt to the situation, he pointed out.

His company though, changed all marketing material for its client, and pushed the message of “normalcy.” It carried out an aggressive social media campaign, backed up by reviews from travellers who stayed at the hotel most recently. It also used live videos from the hotel itself showing how normal everything was.

“The campaign was a roaring success. Traffic to the website spiked by 550%, and overall bookings grew by over 440%. The campaign started in October last year, and we were getting bookings for as far as February and March this year.We were doing 3200% over the average revenue the market was making,” he revealed, explaining how his team did what Sri Lanka Tourism was supposed to have done to help the entire tourism industry.

Govt. announces curbs on State expenses but officials misuse or abuse public funds

The Government has announced curbs on State expenses due to the country’s crippling financial crisis. Some officials however, continue to be either unable, or unwilling, to fully grasp the extent of the crisis.

Take for example, a recent request by the Audit Department of a prominent government institution. Officials there put in a request for an advance of Rs. 80,000 as fuel expenses to visit two tourist bungalows belonging to the institution in Anuradhapura and Mannar. The purpose of the visit was supposedly to conduct an audit on the annual fixed assets of the two bungalows.

Of the three vehicles, one belonged to the Chief Financial Officer, the other to the Deputy General Manager of Operational Finances and the third was to carry the rest of the staff.

However, the Procurement Officer had rightly given approval to release funds for fuelling only one vehicle, making a note that given the prevailing fuel crisis, the entire team should be able to
travel on long distance trips in one vehicle.

Sources said such requests were commonplace in various institutions and many staff members use such tactics to ensure they could take family members on all expenses paid trips through State funds.

One way for Thilini, another for Indian fisherfolk

The Prisons Department came under criticism recently for obvious reasons: Despite all security measures taken, somehow narcotics and mobile phones find their way inside its gates for highly connected influential figures who often enjoy their stay in prison
hospitals after falling into sudden illnesses.  

The latest is how prison officials in Jaffna last week produced a group of Indian fisherfolk in the Magistrate’s Court for allegedly engaging in bottom trawling in the Northern waters.

All twelve fishermen were handcuffed and chained with more prison officials around for security as they were shown their way to court. One lawyer inside the court premises was heard asking one of his colleagues whether all these security measures were necessary for a bunch
of fisherfolk.

This was not how they brought Thilini Priyamali without handcuffs, to the World Trade Centre where she ran her office, he said sarcastically. She is the main suspect of a multi-billion rupees scam.

Who killed Iran’s General Soleimani?

In Colombo, the Iranian Embassy organised an event on Wednesday to commemorate one of its celebrated military figures, General Qasem Soleimani who was assassinated in a US drone attack near the Baghdad International Airport in 2020. Former Public Security Minister Sarath Weerasekara and Parliamentarian Mohamed Muzammil were among the guests at the event. The former minister Weerasekara delivered a keynote address titled ‘Battle against terrorism’.

What caught the attention of many is his tweet where he stressed that “General Soleimani was assassinated in a terrorist attack three years ago” but he did not name the perpetrators.

PM taken for a ride in comedy of errors

Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena was the chief guest this week at a ceremony organised by the Fisheries Department to declare open a pilot coolant system on multi-day fishing trawlers to reduce post-harvest losses and improve food security.

The PM attended the event on the invitation of Fisheries Minister Douglas Devananda and State Minister Piyal Nishantha.

The plaque which commemorated the function however, proclaimed the project had been launched “with a view of reducing food security.”

A journalist pointed out the glaring error with a photograph of the plaque on Twitter, noting that the PM should read such plaques before he unveils them. To add insult to injury, he noted that the blunder had been repeated in all three languages.

“These simple blunders tell the unfortunate quality of those responsible for such matters,” he added.

Vehicle mafia in ministries: Secretaries get best vehicles

A Cabinet Minister’s letter to his State Minister on the difficulty of finding vehicles for their official use has inadvertently shone a spotlight on how senior officials seem to be having more access to luxury vehicles than ministers.

The Minister had sent the letter in response to a letter by the State Minister regarding the return of official vehicles. It noted that the Ministry Secretary had not been issued an official vehicle by the ministry, but he had brought over the V8 car he was using from the previous ministry to which he was attached.
An additional secretary had been allocated a double cab for her use, while another additional secretary had been allocated a Prado.

With the State Minister’s official vehicle in need of repairs that were difficult to make due to the lack of spare parts amid import restrictions, and with no other vehicles available, the Cabinet Minister had informed the State Minister that he would temporarily assign the V8 vehicle allocated to him to the State Minister for his use. In the meantime, the Cabinet Minister would be using a friend’s private vehicle.

The situation was the same at many other ministries, a top government source disclosed, claiming that some senior officials had the pick of the best vehicles while ministers had to make do with whatever they could find.

“There is a vehicle mafia inside many ministries,” the source claimed.

History repeats itself; what happened in Sirima’s time happens again in more destructive way

When former Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike declared in a May Day rally held in 1974 that the country was facing its worst economic crisis since Independence, she would have never imagined that the country would witness a similar or worse plight decades later.

“The only salvation lies in making the country self sufficient,” the then Prime Minister told a May Day crowd. “We are facing a crisis such as the country has never yet faced in its history.”

These words were not only reported in the local media but worldwide in newspapers such as the New York Times.

Strikingly, these reports, filed nearly fifty years ago, had many similarities and almost the same root causes for the economic crisis back then and now. It seemed that successive governments and the political leadership failed to take tangible steps to avoid a recurrence of a similar tragedy a generation later.

Some excerpts from the NYT archive are as follows; “A diplomat remarked that Sri Lanka was living “a ship-to-mouth” existence. An economist said: “the country is now operating on a week to week basis. We check how much comes in and how much goes out. We don’t think beyond the week. We can’t”.

“It’s a spectacular non-achievement,” an economist said. “They’re Importing 50 per cent more than they’re exporting. They’re broke, and because they are forced to spend so much money on food, they have very little left for petroleum, fertiliser and manufactured products to keep the economy going.””  

For more details see; https://www.nytimes.com/1974/05/13/archives/sri-lanka-short-of-food- faces-an-economic-crisis- people-are-well.html