Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau has been on a slow but on a steady journey promoting the destination with its promotional campaigns and marketing strategies this year mainly focusing on the new Tourism brand identity, ‘’ Sri Lanka You will come back for more’’ which indicated a new beginning in its success.
With the bouncing back from the past economic crisis, the main promotion activity that was launched was the ‘’Seeing is Believing’ ’campaign which was continued in 2024 by inviting nearly 58 foreign media personnel including travel Influencers and bloggers generating over USD 550 mn worth of media publicity for Sri Lanka Tourism
As one of the main promotional activity, there were 16 international travel shows such as ITB-Germany, FITU- Spain, ATM-Dubai, IFTM-France, SATTE-India, BIT- Milan, GITF- China, etc were attended upto August this year along with the local travel industry and 16 Road shows were organized in India, China, Australia and in Turkey covering different cities to facilitate more focus on B2B sessions.
Sri Lanka Tourism also supported many events of importance to the country such as Duruthu Perahera, Gangarama Navam Perahera, Buddha Rashmi Vesak Festival and Kandy Esala Perahera.
The major achievement for this year is the launch of PR and Digital campaigns in India, China, UK, Germany and in France for a period of one yea and for six months respectively. This will create more awareness about Sri Lanka to the travelling public in these countries focusing winter season and coming 2025.
Sri Lanka Tourism won fifteen International endorsements in 2024 , including being ranked as the fourth most popular solo Travel destination for 2024 , by the Forbes Magazine , selected as the fifth-fastest-growing tourism destination, according to , topping the list on best places for solo female travel in 2024, and many more. Sri Lanka Tourism added another feather to its cap by bagging the ‘’Best International Tourism Board ‘’ award at the Global Tourism Awards Ceremony recently held in New Delhi, India. All these promotional activities have contributed towards achieving 1,289,693 tourists to Sri Lanka as of 14th of August from main source markets such as India, UK, Russia, Germany, France and China while countries such as Australia, USA, Netherlands and Poland have shown a strong potential for future growth . With all these achievements in hand, Sri Lanka Tourism is hopeful that it will achieve the tourism target of 2,3 million tourists this year.