Sri Lanka’s spectacular tourist growth looks set to stall

The boom in tourist arrivals is tipped to taper off if forward booking intelligence data shared by a specialist firm yesterday at  the Asian Hotel and Tourism Investment Conference in Colombo comes true. 

A presentation given by ForwardKeys to delegates at the Conference revealed that flight bookings made for travel to Sri Lanka during the coming five months (December 2016 to April 2017) are 1.3% ahead of where they were at the same time last year. 

The intelligence comes from ForwardKeys’ analysis of over 16 million flight booking transactions a day made by travel agents on the world’s major travel distribution systems.

More in-depth analysis shows a choppy pattern. Bookings for December and January are respectively 3.5% and 4.1% ahead but February and March are 9.8% and 21.3% behind year-on-year. April is 76.9% ahead but this number needs to be viewed with caution because April is four months off and booking numbers are consequently relatively low. The likely reason for the substantial variation is that the Easter holiday season falls later in 2017. 

Whilst forward bookings overall appear somewhat lacklustre, within them are a couple of particularly encouraging signs. First, forward bookings for Chinese New Year (27 Jan to 2 Feb) are 12% ahead.

Second, there appears to be a turnaround in enthusiasm of Russians to visit Sri Lanka, as a trend of falling monthly visitor numbers throughout 2016 is being replaced by a surge of interest. Visitor arrivals for the year to date are 26.4% down on the previous year but future bookings for November and the next five months are 13.1% ahead. 

Compounding the disturbing trend of slower growth is an estimated reduction in scheduled seat capacity by 6.7% in early next year according to ForwardKeys. This is partly because of the reduced operating hours at the Bandaranaike International Airport during January to April to facilitate the upgrade of the runway. 

The cautious outlook on Sri Lanka is also in sharp contrast to impressive visitor growth in 2016 when arrivals have grown by 11.8%, which is more than twice the growth of the Asia Pacific region, which grew by 4.9%. 

Looking at Sri Lanka’s major source markets, India was up 10.3%, the UK up 17.3%, Germany up 13.1%, Saudi Arabia up 8.3% and China up 29.2%. The latter figure is particularly notable when one considers that Chinese visitors to competitor destinations such as Mauritius were down 0.6% and to the Maldives down 17.6%.

ForwardKeys APAC Director of Business Development Jameson Wong said: “Our data shows that Sri Lanka deserves congratulations on a tremendous year for attracting visitors. In a competitive environment, continued effort will be needed to keep up the impressive rate of growth.”