Financial Times

PATA website widens reach with Asian languages

The Bangkok based Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) has announced the launching of a website in some Asian languages such as Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

PATA is an international organization that promotes the interests of government and private sector bodies like tourist boards, airlines, hotels and other travel related interests throughout the Asia-Pacific rim.

In keeping with PATA’s mission of enhancing the growth, value and quality of Asia Pacific travel & tourism, the site, known as PATA.org, will seek to promote its services through communications hitherto available exclusively in English. According to the PATA news release, contemporary design and easy navigability will enable members to nominate their own usernames and passwords to enter the ‘members only’ zone.

A major objective of setting up the site is to draw attention to more obscure parts of the Asia-Pacific region long ignored “by the travel and tourism powers-that-be”. Initially, two destinations have been selected for study, Central Java and North Korea.

Central Java is said to have all the makings of a major tourist destination. A Task Force dispatched by PATA has recommended the setting up of a Central Java Tourism Board and writing a tourism plan with grass roots inputs and ownership. PATA will recommend policies and strategies for development.

PATA admits to having taken “a potentially controversial step” in picking the second destination, North Korea,. A PATA-appointed Task Force has studied the country’s tourism products, market potential, air access, ground operations, infrastructure and prospects for modernising the national carrier. N. Korea is said to be “one of Asia’s best kept secrets”.

For a member country like Sri Lanka, with a 95 percent literacy rate and a travel industry that is highly competent in communicating in the English language, the use of Sri Lanka’s own languages may do little to build and enhance its relations with the travel generating and receiving countries of the world. Indeed, such a proposition seems irrelevant.

But, PATA’s choice of Asian languages for the website is significant in one respect. Those whose native languages are Japanese, Korean and Chinese represent a large bloc of countries with a common heritage with Sri Lanka in the form of Buddhist traditions and monuments.

The website presents an unparalleled opportunity for Sri Lanka to speak to the three nations in their own languages about our parallel legacy. President of the Travel Agents’ Association of Sri Lanka (TAASL), Nihal Perera, says that some of our own monuments have not been adequately promoted in comparison to the art, sculpture and architecture of other Buddhist cultures. The 46-foot standing Buddha at Aukana and the scene of the Buddha’s passing in Polonnaruwa, both hewn ‘in-situ’ out of large natural rock, are marvels of artistic creation that should normally be attracting larger numbers of visitors from parallel cultures.

Dagobas like Ruwanveliseya have been compared in dimensions to the pyramids of Egypt but the travel industry has not done justice to them. Aesthetically attractive temples, churches and mosques in this multi-religious society that qualifies the island to claim the epithet, “truly Asia” - now acquired by Malaysia – could fill many a colourful page in a website.

These days when ‘eco-tourism’ is a buzz-word in the travel industry, nature’s gifts to the island like rain forests, waterfalls, verdant hills, blow holes on the coast and thermal springs could be in a separate exciting category.

The Tourist Board and inbound travel operators must lobby PATA and assist the organization to document these sites for inclusion in the website so as to widen our reach beyond those literate in English. Those conversant only with the vernacular in Japan, China and Korea must surely have both the enthusiasm and the wherewithal for exploratory travel.

(The writer could be reached at panis3@yahoo.com)

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