Sri Lanka's January 2022 arrivals down 8% from December 2021
The 82,327 tourist arrivals to the country during January 2022, despite several promotional efforts carried out by tourism authorities, was an 8% contraction over December 2021’s 89,506 tourists, which incidentally, is the highest number of arrivals achieved since the COVID-19 outbreak in March 2020.
The first week of January saw 20,544 tourists, but the trend slowed down in the second and third weeks to 18,628 and 16,917 respectively as a result of the spike in global COVID cases. However, the fourth week again showed a sharp increase of arrivals with 26,238.
Russia emerged as the largest tourist traffic generator accounting for 13.4 percent (13,478) of the total arrivals to the country. The 2nd largest source market for Sri Lanka was India, accounting for 14.2 percent (11,751), whereas Ukraine was the 3rd largest contributing 9.4 percent (7,774) to the total tourist traffic. Germany and France ranked as the 4th and 5th largest source markets with 7,442, and 5,339 arrivals, respectively.
Failing to meet the envisaged 100,000 arrivals target set for the month, the country promptly revised its tourist arrival forecast for 2022 – down from 2.3 million set in December 2021, to 1.1 million; Tourism ministry officials cited the spread of the new COVID-19 variant, Omicron as a major cause that is hampering global travel, whilst adding that strict outbound travel restrictions imposed by China and Japan also impacted the numbers.
Having declared 2022 as “Visit Sri Lanka Year” with hopes of generating US$ 10 billion from the tourism sector by 2025, January was perhaps not the dream start. Nevertheless, 82,327 arrivals in that month augurs well and may signal an upward trajectory in the next couple of months.
Hospitality Sri Lanka
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