Profile: John Earl, communications adviser

Tourism in Sri Lanka has suffered in recent years as a consequence of a protracted and painful civil war. But with the conflict now over, the government is pinning its hopes of a speedy recovery on marketing the country’s richest asset – itself.

“Certainly the war has had an effect,” says John Earl, a communications expert from the UK who has been working with the Ministry of Tourism for the past year on a plan to boost tourist numbers.

Visitors to the island state dropped by almost a quarter from 566,000 in 2004 to just 438,000 in 2008 – principally as a result of increased hostilities.

But the war was not the only cause of the decline. It was exacerbated, Mr Earl feels, by holidaymakers increasingly unwilling or unable to take long haul trips abroad amid a world financial crisis and concerns about climate change.

“[The country] has had a rough time,” he says, “mainly in that there hasn’t been growth, and if there is no growth there is no investment. Now that the war has ended there is a massive opportunity.”

During the course of his secondment – which was funded by the Commonwealth Secretariat – Mr Earl helped the Ministry develop, for the first time, a comprehensive four-year national strategy. It was a decision, he explains, aimed at making a break with the past.

Tourism in Sri Lanka first took off in the 1960s when commercial air travel opened the country up to large swathes of holidaymakers from countries such as the United Kingdom, France and Germany. “The template for Sri Lanka was very much sun, sea and sand,” says Mr Earl.

“[It was] a hotel on a beach with a swimming pool. The idea was to take an aircraft full of people, put them on a coach and into a hotel - where they stayed. You could be anywhere.”

Keen to diversify its ‘product’, the Sri Lankan Government decided it needed a comprehensive strategy to help it attract visitors from countries closer to home, such as India, the Middle East, China, Japan and even Russia.

Mr Earl helped draw together the different strands of thinking at the Ministry’s four different tourist divisions into a coherent work plan. He spoke to more than 40 of the country’s top tourist industry leaders - from hotel owners and tour operators to events managers and chauffeurs – and pieced together a picture of the tourist industry’s needs and ambitions.

“Sri Lanka is immensely unique in that it is a very small island with just about every form of potential tourism you could want. It is absolutely stuffed full of boutique hotels, in the mountains you have got ballooning, kayaking, wonderful rivers, mountaineering, BMX riding.

“The starting point was, where are we now and where do we want to be?”

The resulting strategy document is “ambitious”, concedes Mr Earl. It involves creating an extra 7,000 rooms, improving service levels and training in the hospitality sector and more than tripling tourist numbers to 1.5 million a year by 2016.

But the impact, he believes, could be dramatic – helping to increase the government’s “yield per tourist” from US$80 to US$130, helping micro, small and medium enterprises across the country, and putting food on the table of ordinary workers – from hotel cleaners to taxi drivers.

Mr Earl, who has also helped the Ministry and various tourist divisions revamp their websites and paper-based internal communications during his assignment, does not want to take the credit for the strategy.

“My core task was to ask questions,” he says. “It’s helping people to see the wood from the trees. Like coaching, helping them to think through the logical paths for themselves with me acting as a facilitator. It was their ideas I took and then helped build into a coherent strategy.

“I encouraged them to think much more clearly in a more focused way about product mix, about the markets that they were going into, and how to make themselves evident to the world at large.”

Secretariat Links:

• Country Profile: Sri Lanka