Blame-game triggered adverse travel advisories, claims Malik

Saturday, 27 July 2019 05:34 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

By Charumini de Silva

A top tourism expert this week said that the adverse travel advisories from 37 countries were imposed on the Government of Sri Lanka following the ‘blame game’ post-Easter Sunday terror attacks and not over industry risk.

“I am firmly of the view that the advisories were on the Government and not on the attacks because it was a one-off incident and anyone who is analytical knows this was an outlier. The attacks could have been prevented and the advisories largely came in because of the disarray following the blame game with no one in charge,” MJF Holdings and Dilmah Tea Director Malik Fernando said on Thursday.

He made these remarks at ‘Let’s Build Local to Go Global,’ a discussion organised by the European Chamber of Commerce of Sri Lanka (ECCSL) to elevate the Sri Lankan tourism industry to reignite confidence in the European market.

Fernando said days after the attacks tourism authorities held a press conference on the recovery path, but the entire discussion ended with all measures taken looking backwards, which was not helpful for the industry.

“In that background, I told a few of my colleagues that we have got to do something about it. If we believe the same Government that got us into this mess will get us of the mess, it is stupid. That is not going to happen,” he added.

Fernando, who is also one of the founder members of the Sri Lanka Tourism Alliance, which is an exclusively private sector group of tourism companies formed in the wake of the Easter Sunday bombings, said that the first templates of the actionable reports on Recovery Plan for Sri Lanka and Disaster Recovery Plan would be unveiled within the next two months.

He noted that #lovesrilanka was the brainchild of the Alliance which was formed with the intention of creating a single point of information on the security situation in the country, as well as communications to potential international tourists to build confidence and mitigate the negative effects of the attacks with the support of Australia’s Market Development Facility and the USAID-led YouLead Project.

“The report on the Recovery Plan for Sri Lanka Tourism is a private sector initiative led by Tourism Australia and it will be unveiled in early September. The Disaster Recovery Plan was finalised last week and it will be rolled out within the next two weeks,” Fernando added.

He said this was the first time the industry was having such guidelines to mitigate further terrorist attacks, natural disasters or any epidemic situation.

“As the private sector, we needed to be more proactive in determining the industry’s future, advocating the position and the direction of the industry, which will be done through our data observatory at the Alliance. That is the silver lining of this,” he pointed out.