Q: What are the plans drawn up to turn Sri Lanka into one of the most sought after tourist destinations in Asia?

Q: What are the plans drawn up to turn Sri Lanka into one of the most sought after tourist destinations in Asia?

A: Sri Lanka is a foremost tourist destination which has diverse attractions along with beauty, culture and warm and hospitable people. The only negative factor which caused a setback was LTTE terrorism. During the past 30 years, we could not gear ourselves because a few tourists came to our country due to this threat.


Tourists strolling on the Arugam Bay beach. Picture by Sudath Malaweera

The fascist terrorism led by Prabhakaran over the past three decades has been wiped out by President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. Sri Lanka is indebted to them as we have achieved peace which would benefit the future generation and the country as a whole. The tourism industry suffered the most due to terrorism and the industry which would benefit the most due to its eradication is also tourism. Today, we have to invest on products.

During the past 30 years, hoteliers found it difficult even to pay salaries to their employees and new hotels did not come up because nobody wanted to invest as there was no growth in the tourism sector.

Nearly two third of our coastal line was subject to some sort of terrorism. So we could not develop tourism in the North and East either. Today, things have changed for the better.

We could promote tourism in difficult times as well. At present, the Tourism Ministry and the private sector have joined hands to take tourism forward. We managed to get nearly 500,000 tourists to Sri Lanka even during difficult times.

Today, two million Sri Lankans are living abroad . If part of them come to Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka will take an upturn in tourism. When we look at the July figures, there is 28 percent growth in the tourism sector. When we catered to the Middle East market, many laughed at us. I am proud to say, we had a mammoth growth of 104 percent in the Middle East market during July this year.

No market in Sri Lanka has recorded such a high growth. Today, we have looked at Eastern Europe, Middle East, China, India and other SAARC countries. We are not looking at the traditional market in Europe. We have diversified the other key markets as well. Keeping in line with the President’s mission, we are aggressively promoting our tourism with the Middle East and India. So we are geared very well to promote Sri Lanka. Tourism sector contribution to the GDP is one to two percent. In future, there will be a major upturn due to the growth of the tourism sector.