Thursday, January 6, 2022
Even though the tourism sector of Sri Lanka is fighting hard due to the Covid-19 situation, the island nation in 2021 welcomed the highest number of tourists from abroad in December with majority of the vacationers coming from India.
A total of 194,495 tourists arrived in Sri Lanka in spite of closing down borders in the wake of the health crisis for several months. Roughly, one-fourth of them were from India, said the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority (SLTDA).
The SLTDA explained that India topped the list with 56,268 tourists, followed by Russia (16,268) and the UK (16,646), Germany (12,442), Ukraine (7,037), France (6,549), the US (6,124), Kazakhstan (5,754), Canada (5,079) and China (2,417).
Sri Lanka’s tourism was further damaged by the third wave of the pandemic in April 2021, after witnessing two Covid-19 waves.
Sri Lanka slowly opened for holidaymakers, one of the top tourist destinations in the world, and many promotions were introduced in this connection.
Flag carrier, SriLankan Airlines, launched a ‘Buy One, Get One Free Ticket’ campaign for Indian tourists, to get more visitors from the neighbouring country.
Also, the airlines started weekly flights to Chennai and Mumbai, while operations commenced to Bengaluru, Madurai, Tiruchirappalli, Trivandrum, and Cochin.
Sri Lanka opened its borders in August 2021 for fully vaccinated travellers. And on September, it removed the mandatory on-arrival PCR tests as well.
The tourism sector of Sri Lanka, the third highest foreign income earner, experienced a huge damage with the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks on Christian churches and five-star hotels in April 2019, killing 250 people along with foreign nationals.
Tags: Sri Lanka
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