Financial Times

NGO campaigns delay tourism recovery

By Ajit De Soysa

Some international NGOs are still going around the world collecting money for post tsunami work in Sri Lanka with sympathetic stories, which is one of the reasons why Sri Lanka hasn’t recovered as fast as Thailand or India, a tourism industry leader said.

“NGOs continue to carry out campaigns with sympathetic stories or dramatise the stories in order to collect more funds. In international magazines they advertise and say so many people are without food, so many people are without water or so many are dying of this and that. If they don’t show that people will not give money to those NGOs,” Hiran Cooray, President of the Tourist Hotels Association of Sri Lanka (TASL), told the monthly meeting of The Sunday Times Business Club last week.

“I strongly believe this is one of the reasons why we didn’t recover as fast as Thailand and India.” Cooray and Abbas Esufally, chairman of Serendib Hotels, made a joint presentation on the industry and its future challenges pointing out that one of the problems now is the lack of a public-private sector partnership.

“The fact remains that we haven’t been able to meet the Tourism Minister for the past eight months,” said Esufally. Asked whether they had then sought an appointment with the President, he said: “Yes and we didn’t get that too.” Both said the industry planned to do its own marketing of the tourism product.

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