Tourist arrivals hit 125,000 mark in March

Tourist arrivals reached 125,000 arrivals during March, the highest achievement within a single month during the year. This is an increase of 16.4 % as of 2022 March. The target set for March was 90,000 arrivals.

The total for the three months from January to the end of March has recorded over 335,000 arrivals. Sri Lanka targets to achieve around 1.5 million arrivals for 2023 and in the first quarter of the year 22% target has been achieved. Russian arrivals reached 25,000 tourists again making it the top source market for Sri Lanka while India with over 18,000 became number two while UK and Germany too were among the next two highest source markets for Sri Lanka for March 2023.

Their average duration of stay in the country was 9.11 nights and most of the tourists have been staying over 10 days. An official from Sri Lanka Tourism pointed out that over 50,000 rooms were available in the formal sector and about 45% occupancy is officially recorded in addition to 30,000 rooms available in the informal sector such as small-scale guest houses and home stay and they too had good occupancy.

Sri Lanka Tourism has identified nine key markets to boost during this year. They are Russia, India, the UK, China, Germany, France, the Middle East, Australia and Nordic countries as focused markets. “These arrival figures have proved successful results of the efforts taken by SLTPB with their aggressive campaigns conducted in such focused countries.”

Meanwhile, US$ 331.1 million has been achieved by the tourism industry up to February 2023.