Prema Cooray, Chairman – Sri Lanka Convention Bureau, describes India as “the obvious place to go to promote tourism”. He will be leading a team to that country to tap the corporate meetings and conferences potential there. Prior to his forthcoming departure, however, he is in a reflective mood, casting his mind back ten years, when - during the late 1990s, “There were three problems - Flights were very few and always full; Indian Airlines had an older fleet and couldn’t increase capacity.
“Secondly, any Indian had to obtain a visa to come to Sri Lanka and it used to take three or four days to get a visa. Today, of course, Sri Lanka is the only country in SAARC where a leisure tourist gets a visa on arrival.
“Third, India’s currency regime was restrictive, not allowing people to take foreign exchange out, even on the current account. We worked on clearing those impediments and we have no problems in those three areas today.”
Besides, travel packages to Sri Lanka were very expensive compared to available options like Singapore, Malaysia Thailand or Mauritius. At that time - in November 2001, Udaya Nanayakkara, the former SLTB President, and Cooray recognised that people had a huge fear of traveling. (This was four months after the LTTE attack on the Katunayake International Airport and two months after 9/11.)
“SriLankan Airlines was approached to make an attractive offer. They asked us to put a package together - and they gave us a thundering ‘Buy One, Get One Free’ offer. You won’t believe what price does to people… 20,000 Indian leisure travelers visited in four months! Since that day, we have not been able to stop the Indians from coming,” says Cooray contentedly.
But Cooray believes that we have not touched even the tip of the iceberg yet and that it makes sense to go to India at this time… Taj has more than 60 to 70 rooms booked on meetings; which itself is a ready-reckoner that the market has potential… We have done our research with our Indian counterparts, with Taj and with the corporate community.
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