Does Sri Lanka have a proper marketing plan for SL tourism?

SRI Lanka’s tourism industry contributes 12% to the GDP currently. All the Southeast Asian markets are doing better than Sri Lanka when it comes to tourism, the reason being inconsistent marketing and promotion strategies which change with the change of each regime in power. Thus, SL tourism is stagnating. Another reason is that the tourism targets are not challenging enough compared to other Southeast Asian markets.

- By Deepika Gunasekera

Sri Lanka received a revenue of $ 2 billion in 2023 and § 3 billion in 2024 which are not too impressive given our potential.

Liberalisation of Government poli-cies, visa reforms, infrastructure, and targeted marketing activities are pivotal for a great tourism promotional campaign. It seems so easy; however, Sri Lanka has not done a good job on this to date. With so much to offer, SL is ranked at the 76th position in the Travel and Tourism Development Index in 2024.

Target market analysis

An analysis should be done to find out who comes to Southeast Asia as tourists and for what purposes. Sri Lanka needs to get a portion or grab market share from other Southeast Asian countries. We also need to analyse the psychographics and demographics of our potential customers. Marketing is “satisfying the needs of your customer”. We need to keep this important fact in mind.

We need to increase the share of visitors from markets such as India, which is currently the market from which we receive the most number of tourists. Since India is a large country, we need to focus on the geographic areas in India from where these tourists visit such as Gujarat and Maharashtra. Whilst trying to obtain more visitors from existing markets, we need to identify new markets. Also, we need to target customers who have purchasing power in countries such as Europe, USA, UK, Japan, Australia, and the Middle East.

Targeted customers could be segmented into individuals and young couples, families, businesses, and retirees. Market segmentation is vital in this endeavour.