Saturday Apr 27, 2024
Saturday Apr 27, 2024
Wednesday, 17 July 2019 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
By Maleesha Sulthanagoda
Q: It’s been three months since the Easter Sunday attacks, what are your views on the recovery progress of the tourism industry?
Abbas: For the tourism industry to be successful, the security and safety of the traveller is paramount. As of now, the Government has proved that they can guarantee traveller security. This is reflected by most travel advisories being lifted by foreign countries, encouraging their citizens to travel here. To that extent, we are happy with the progress.
Malik: Although travel advisories were lifted, the ground situation in the country is pretty awful in terms of occupancy and other sectors of the industry. There is a lot of work to be done in order to pick up demand and occupancy to the levels where businesses are breaking even. If you look at the industry as a whole, you can see that most small businesses are in jeopardy and some are even closing up. So our work is only just beginning.
Abbas: Our goal is to rapidly increase arrivals, so that we can boost the industry back to its original state as fast as possible, because the main thing that we have to understand is that it isn’t only the occupancy in the hotels and that it reflects arrivals and the amount spent by these tourists. In the tourism industry, there are direct and a lot of indirect beneficiaries. These indirect beneficiaries depend on the industry for their livelihood and they are being impacted severely, in that aspect the situation is still awful. It’s showing signs of improvement, but it’s too slow, we want to accelerate the growth and the return to normalcy.
Q: As the founders of the Sri Lanka Tourism Alliance, what was your motivation to create it and how did you garner the support for it to be successful?
Malik: The motivation was to be a single source of credible security related information and to highlight the return to normalcy. A few days after the attacks, there were no clear communication of the true situation domestically or internationally. The lack of clear communication to the travel trade and to travellers overseas was critical. As a result there was a lot of confusion and haphazard booking cancellations by tourists.
Secondly, if you look at the travellers who have already booked, almost all were cancelled. This so-called off season was looking to be the best ever, in terms of occupancy. The primary task was to protect these bookings by communicating that the attacks were a one-off with minimal chances of future attacks and that the security forces had the situation under control. I could see that this information was not being relayed internationally. So I spoke to a few of my colleagues and we agreed that we had to act, as industry stakeholders, in the absence of clear communication. Subsequently, we set the Sri Lanka Tourism Alliance as a mechanism to communicate true information in a timely and systematic fashion.
We also set up #lovesrilanka, because we wanted to fast track the process of information propagation into the hands of the tourists. The goal was to give daily, sometimes, hourly updates on social media sites, such as Twitter about the live situation in the country. We were initially relaying security news. This also acted as a way to counter fake news. As there were a lot of it swirling around due to the lack of clear communication.
Abbas: As of now, Government authorities and the Tourist Board are working with so many procedural delays. This is evident by the fact that the disaster management recovery plan is still not implemented. This is because they have so many procedures to follow; there is no flexibility. As a private sector group, we are more nimble and agile. Particularly due to the fact that we funded ourselves, we are able to act and do what should be done by the authorities. This was one of the driving forces that got us together as an Alliance and to supplement the work of the authorities. Initially, our objective was to disseminate factual information. Now we have gone past that stage, to a broader view. We post information on current events and future events. The whole narrative is now changing to things that would attract tourists back to Sri Lanka.
Q: What is your plan moving forward with the website and the Alliance?
Within a short period of time, the whole industry gathered around our initiative. We currently have around 150 hotel members consisting of big hotel chains, small independent hotels, travel agents and many more. Our Alliance is open to all in the trade, no matter the size. It’s clear that everyone is desperate to rebuild the industry and to communicate the clear message of normalcy returning to the country. So from the initial phase of information dissemination, moving forward, we plan to reinvigorate the industry.
We’ve been having two days of workshops on a recovery plan, assisted by the Australian Government and an Australian tourism expert on how the private sector can work together to help each other. On 16 July in London, we partnered with two travel operators in the UK to have a ‘Sri Lanka has returned’ type of event to garner publicity in the European market.
As we are in the private sector, we can move very flexibly and help the recovery for everybody. One of the things we are doing search engine marketing. For a few weeks after the attacks, there were around 5,000 searches per day on whether Sri Lanka is safe to visit and they were getting information which mislead them. They were getting news such as, ‘more attacks are imminent’, ‘bombs can go off at any time’ and ‘Sri Lanka is not safe’. It was reflecting all the fake news to travellers.
To combat this, at the moment we are spending around $10,000 per month from donor money on search engine marketing, so that if someone types in that search, they come to accurate articles that reassures them. Our job is to constantly generate content on safety and the return to normalcy. In this manner, we were able to reduce the number of cancellations to a certain degree.
Q: What was the purpose of the SLTA workshop that took place?
Malik: After the Alliance started, we all realised that there was potential for the organisation to grow into something bigger. Currently, there are long-established associations representing specific segments of the industry. Those are more focused on internal issues. There is a vacuum for aspects such as marketing. At the workshop sessions, we agreed that even though the industry retuned to its state before the attacks, it wouldn’t be enough.
Despite what hype there may have been, the yields were low. We were not getting enough high-spending tourists and we were getting over-tourism in places such as Yala and Sigiriya. It was clear that the tourism industry in the country was not particularly healthy, even before the attacks.
One of the roles that we can play as an alliance is to advocate to authorities and among ourselves, to follow Vision 2025. We have to learn from countries like Thailand, which have suffered from over-tourism. Their culture, ecology and such have been devastated. So we are focusing on complementing Vision 2025 and to improve the quality of the products that we offer as well.
There will also be a report that will come out by the end August, which will consist of very actionable things that the private sector can engage in and things that the private sector can lobby the Government to do. It will be called the ‘Love Sri Lanka Resilience Roadmap,’ which we hope that the Government and the private sector can work together on and implement. There will be another report coming out in conjunction with the ‘Resilience Roadmap,’ called the ‘Disaster Recovery Plan,’ which will focus on the steps to be taken if there is a disaster in the future.
It was also clear to us that after the attack that the private sector needed to be more proactive in determining the industry’s future and advocating the position and the direction of tourism. Hence, we are also working on a data observatory. There is very little data gathered around tourism in Sri Lanka. Even the value of tourism is a guesstimate. Therefore, our observatory will gather data from hoteliers, so that on a weekly, or monthly basis, we can share the state of the industry, from an occupancy, yield, room rate and an arrival point of view.
Data-based analytics is very uncommon in the industry. Without data we can’t plan, so that is another major outcome of the Alliance and the recent workshop. Representatives from small business owners, as well as big hotel chains are involved in this project.
Abbas: High yielding, low ecological impact tourism is our main goal moving forward. This was a very useful workshop, because it did two things. It spread the idea of the Alliance to a much larger cross-section of the industry and for us to get input from them as to areas which need more focus. This is a consultative process, therefore it can bring in very positive outcomes.
Although the tourism industry in Sri Lanka has better known players, what made the country known as Lonely Planet’s No. 1 tourist destination in 2019 was its smaller components, which make up the ecosystem of the industry. So it’s important that these smaller players are also included in our plans moving forward.
Q: Will there be more workshops such as this in the future?
Malik: Quite possibly, but we are currently concentrating on the things that were discussed in the recent sessions. It was clear to us that the private sector could do a lot more to improve the state of the industry. So our focus now is on action, rather than more plans or more workshops. We want to walk the talk.
Q: What are your views on the recent provisions by the Government in hopes of boosting the tourism industry?
Abbas: We had to focus on different things after the attacks took place. One was the Financial Relief package, which ensured that all financial needs of members of the industry were met. This was fairly well done, but there are some implementation issues, that are currently being fixed.
The second was the PR and the marketing campaigns. The Alliance is heavily involved in rebranding Sri Lanka. The third was the entry costs into the country. We had to identify ways to bring in more high spending tourists. Countries such as India and Maldives players a major role to bring in more travellers. The Indian High Commission backed us completely; the Indian Premier visiting Sri Lanka helped immensely in attracting more Indian tourists into the country.
Complementing this, decreasing landing charges was very useful and with the local hoteliers giving discounts around 40%, it was a killer package, which would make the whole visit into the country around 50% cheaper. The same happened when the Maldivian delegate came to Sri Lanka, there was an influx of Maldivian tourists into the country.
At the moment we are also working on attracting more arrivals from the European market. In that aspect, the decision taken by the Cabinet was what we needed to make the country more attractive to travellers. The tourists should find viability in flying in and these types of steps are the correct way to go.
Q: In your opinion, what more can the Government do?
Malik: The biggest single thing that the Government can do is to build demand again. Right now, we can cut costs, look at being more competitive and the hotels are giving deals to make it very tempting for tourists to travel into the country, but there will be another problem in getting our rates back up as time goes on.
We all know it’s easier to cut prices, but very difficult to raise prices again. In this regard, the Government has done nothing to promote the country as an attractive tourist destination. It was clear to us that tourists were more aware of the travel advisories being enforced, then when they were being removed. The Government should be using money collected from hotel levies and things like that to fund ad campaigns to attract tourists, but this is not being done. This is the biggest single frustration of the industry.
The Alliance has done what it can do digitally to promote the country. The style of marketing done by the Government is mostly analogue, such as physical roadshows, etc. In these times, you need modern ways of marketing, for example search engine marketing, Instagram ads and Facebook ads.
Abbas: As the private sector, we can obviously move a lot faster than the Government due to less procedural delays. It is in our best interest and that of our employees that we move as fast as we can, so the public sector and the private sector have to work together to get more done, in a quicker manner.
Q: What do you think the impact of the upcoming elections would have on the progress of the tourism industry?
Abbas: Democracy is something which is championed by many countries. If the democratic process goes through properly, freely and fairly, it’ll be a great for the country and its citizens. We just need it to entail little or no violence and it mustn’t affect anything that would hamper the tourism industry. A vibrant democracy is what we believe in, what we cherish and what we want.
Malik: Any violence will be a serious setback to the little progress we have achieved. If it goes smoothly, it won’t have any significant effect on the industry.
Pix by Ruwan Walpola
