Financial Times

The burgeoning Indian outbound market
The Sunday Times FT specialist writer on travel and tourism, Pani Seneviratne, examines the changing nature of Indian overseas travellers and its significance for Sri Lanka. Seneviratne is familiar with the subject, having been sent to New Delhi in 1996 to set up and operate the first Sri Lankan promotional office in India.

There is no other land that is geographically as close to Sri Lanka as India. No other nation has closer cultural links to Sri Lanka than India. Long before King Ashoka sent his offspring to propagate the Buddhist philosophy the Buddha himself had been a repeat visitor to Sri Lanka. Chola and Pandya invasions from South India left their own legacy of Hinduism on Lankan soil. When landmarks linked to the Ramayana legend of the abduction of Sita by Ravana, King of Lanka, were traced to the hill country around Nuwara Eliya and Ella, Indian investors showed great enthusiasm for developing "Ramayana sites". Ramayana as a tourism tag made it imperative that large flows of devotees are well regulated as in other holy places like Mecca.

In the eighties, the European Market Research Bureau adopted a similar line of logic when it declared that the UK market held the best potential for Sri Lanka: the island had been a British colony, many spoke English fluently and most signage was in English. After much dalliance, a promotional office was established in New Delhi in 1996.

That decision was based on a rule-of-thumb estimation of the potential. If only one percent of the one billion Indian citizens travelled south to Sri Lanka, an influx of 10 million visitors would result, more than we could cope with. A lesser known fact at the time was that Sri Lankan travel to India ranked only second to British tourists visiting India.

When total tourist arrivals in Sri Lanka passed the 400,000 mark for the first time in 1982, the significance of the figure was downgraded by analysts for the reason that "it included 93,000 Indians"! The Indian arrivals included ferry crossings at Talaimannar, numbers that made up 'low spenders, or no spenders'.

Subsequently, the World Tourism Organisation (WTO) forecast an annual growth rate of 5.6 percent for Indian outbound travel between 1995 and 2020. WTO adds that, by 2020, there would be 6.7 million Indian travellers to worldwide destinations.

There remained one obstacle to Indians waiting to visit Sri Lanka - the need for prior visas. When visas on arrival became the rule from 2001, Indian arrivals topped the list with 69,960 in 2002. In 2003, with 90,603, India was only second to UK (93,278) as a generating market.

The Indian traveller profile has been through a transformation since the days of ferry traffic. Silicon Valley has embraced India. More companies in India handle outsourced IT business than anywhere else. Bill Gates came to visit not only Delhi but also Bangalore and Hyderabad. The expanding Indian economy, slowly breaking the shackles of protectionism, induced Bill Clinton to visit Delhi. Multi-media digital technology has driven the media industry in India to new horizons.

There is more glamour, more celebration and bigger spending in urban society. Evidence of this change can be seen in a useful research report on the Indian visitor to Sri Lanka. The Tourist Board conducted a survey of 500 family units and individuals departing between April and July 2003 at the Colombo Airport.

Tabulation by purpose of visit showed that 85 percent were purely on vacation and 5 percent on honeymoon. The average expenditure per tourist was US$ 420. Average daily expenditure per visitor was US$ 58.30. The percentage of visitors engaging in the following activities are shown in brackets:: shopping (91), site seeing tours (79), sampling food at Indian Restaurants (47), sea bathing (34) and watching folk dances (27). A majority (85 percent) took a single destination tour, Sri Lanka only. Those who took two destination tours also visited the Maldives, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. Analysis by occupation revealed that 62 percent of Indian visitors were businessmen, executives, professionals or scientists.

Are we not glad to have them? Director - Marketing, Aitken Spence Travels, Nalin Jayasundera, says that the industry has had to offer enormous incentives to Indians especially in the wake of the terror attack on the Colombo airport. The incentives have begun to pay. There is greater awareness of the destination now. Jayasundera predicts that Indian visitors will soon be paying as much as European tourists do - perhaps more. Another positive factor is that Indians travel here during the months of April, May, June, July, September and October, the slack periods for European traffic.

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