Sri Lanka Tourism Promotional Strategy Leads Emerging Markets to Change the Tourism Mosaic of Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka Tourism arrivals domain has been changed by the emerging new markets occupying the place of long held traditional dominant markets according to the arrival statistics issued for January 2014. This can be seen as an effective result of the strategic promotional campaigns executed in year 2013, giving much focus on the identified emerging markets than totally relying on the traditional European markets for growth.The growth factors of the emerging markets compared with 2013 January vs. 2014 January, recorded extremely high levels of improvement. According to the latest arrival figures, the highly focused emerging markets such as China has gained 3rd place, Russia move up to 4th place while India remaining at 01st followed by Ukraine, Australia as graphically illustrated .Arrivals from East Asia increased to 95.6% with arrivals from China recording a significant 224% growth. South Asia recorded 14.6% growth with India contributing the highest number of arrivals 17,886 up from 16,938 with 5.6% rise. The arrivals from traditional Western European market though relatively low to emerging markets recorded 17.9% growth while UK recording 13.6% increase. However Eastern Europe arrivals have increased by 63.6% as a result of effective, targeted, well designed promotional campaigns executed in those countries. Russia leads the arrivals board from East Europe recording 91.6% growth . Other regions also scored high levels of growth namely Australasia scoring 15.1% ,USA recording 31.5% and North America with 22.4% growth levels.