November 2022 arrivals to Sri Lanka nearly top 60,000
The island welcomed 59,759 tourist arrivals in November 2022 - the third highest number of visitors in a single month, since March’22’s 106,500 and April’s 62,980, respectively. Sri Lanka’s monthly tourist arrivals crossed the 50,000 mark for the first time since then, whilst, the cumulative total in the eleven months for this year reached a total 628,017 tourists.
The arrival of two luxury cruise ships, namely the ‘Mein Schiff 5” during the latter part of November, bringing in 2030 passengers plus 945 crew members and the “ Viking Mars” with 900 tourists, boosted the total visitor numbers for the month.
The tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka for November were led by the Russian Federation, which accounted for 13,800 visitors (23%) of the total arrivals. India with 10,186 tourists ranked as the second largest traffic generator bringing in 17% of the total tourists to Sri Lanka and Germany with 5,197 came in third largest as the country’s source market, contributing 8.7% towards the total tourist arrivals.
The daily average for November of 1992 arrivals showed a significant improvement when compared with the daily arrival average seen in recent months.
Last December, Sri Lanka set a highly ambitious target to attract 2.3 million tourist arrivals during 2022; only to drastically cut such expectations down to 1.1 million, after the ‘Omicron’ variant surfaced in major source markets. In early February, it once again revised its forecast to 1.3 million. When over 100,000 tourists visited Sri Lanka in March 2022, the then Minister of Tourism pinned great expectations of attracting 150,000 visitors monthly in the next six month - meaning, luring more than 1.5 million visitors to Sri Lanka by the end of this year.
In August’22, the current Minister of Tourism, whilst noting that tourism has picked up in July and August this year, opined of one million tourists arriving during 2022 – generating in total US$ 2 billion.
With October revenues, Sri Lanka recorded US$ 1,022 million in accumulative earnings in the ten months compared t US$158.2 million in the corresponding period 2021.
Last week, the Minister was confident that the total visitor arrivals to Sri Lanka for 2022 will reach 800,000 – basing his trust on the Sri Lankan diaspora coming in large numbers to visit their friends and family after two years post-COVID pandemic. But hoteliers say the country is likely to fall short of the 800,000 target and so the caravan of predictions zigzags it way on the bumpy road to recovery.
Hospitality Sri Lanka
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