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Tourist
promo offer comes a cropper At a joint meeting held last week, the key sectors of the crucial travel industry agreed to reactivate tourist arrivals with special promotional offers just like they did following the 2001 Bandaranaike airport disaster when the LTTE attacked it, but while one limb of the industry has gone out offering the ' Buy One Get One Free ' promotional, others have ignored the decision causing confusion in the trade. SriLankan Airlines, which hosted the meeting has already announced that tourists who purchase one air ticket between February 14 and March 15, and travel before June 20, 2005, will be entitled to a free ticket. This offer was to be supported by packages from hoteliers and ground operators which would give a similar deal when it came to hotel rooms and entrance tickets to the Cultural Triangle, wild life parks etc., but the hoteliers and ground operators have not followed up on their promise to support the move. The ' Buy One, Get One Free' offer was to be made to all tour operators in Europe, Japan and India. The Tourist Board also initially supported the move, but has shown no interest in pursuing the matter. Chairman Udhaya Nanayakkara is reported to be out of the country. A senior Tourism Ministry official told The Sunday Times that Tourism Minister Anura Bandaranaike was unaware of the Tourist Board Chairman's foreign visit. " He is probably in Macao ", he said, unable to confirm his exact whereabouts. The official said that the Tourist Board chief also missed the opportunity of meeting World Tourism Organisation secretary general Francesco Frangialli who visited Sri Lanka this week to survey the impact felt on the tourism industry by the tsunami. At a separate meeting recently, several leading hoteliers and ground operators raised issue with the Tourist Board as to what the Singaporean firm hired to promote tourism in Sri Lanka, Batey's had done to promote tourism in the post-tsunami weeks. They pointed out that though only the coastal belt hotels were damaged by the tsunami, all hotels in the interior ran out of tourists with no pro-active campaigning in tourism marketing done to off-set the negative publicity. These hoteliers and ground operators asked how the cess monies collected from the trade were being spent by the Tourist Board, and accused the Board of merely making purchases of vehicles, upping salaries of staffers, and refurbishing their offices. They called for the appointment of a Tourism Marketing and Promotion Authority that could co-ordinate the work of the tourism industry. However, the Tourist Board seniors had told the hoteliers that President Chandrika Kumaratunga was against the setting up of such an Authority because she did not want the private sector to do the work that was entrusted to State agencies. |
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