Foreign journalists join hands with SL Tourism to promote new tagline

Sri Lanka Tourism welcomed a group of mainstream international journalists and travel influencers to promote the destination for upcoming summer and winter seasons (2024/25) while highlighting the new tagline of Sri Lanka Tourism ‘You Will Come Back for More’. 
Representing the key inbound markets for Sri Lanka, the delegation arrived from the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Australia, Singapore, the USA and Canada. Overall, the group of travel influencers and media carried an active global audience of 1.8 million via mainstream travel magazines, news publications, travel blogs and social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok, etc. The total advertising value expected to be gained from this earned media promotion will be over Rs.35 million. 

Sri Lanka’s tourism industry has seen a significant uplift in the first quarter of 2024, having well over 600,000 tourists and these earned media promotions are expected to support continuous growth during the upcoming seasons by creating multiple reasons to select Sri Lanka as a must visit holiday destination in Aisa. 
Addressing the media, SLTPB Chairman Chalaka Gajabahu shared, “The visit of these international media and travel influencers is part of our global campaigns to promote the destination within the key source markets as well as globally. 

The promotion will mainly target on the upcoming summer season, which is considered as a low season for us. This earned media promotion is expected to generate many fresh reasons for traveling back to Sri Lanka.”
“We will continue to work on these kinds of international media and influencer promotions along with our other multiple trade promotions over the upcoming seasons to assure we will continue to grow within 2024 to achieve our overall targets,” he said.

The tour was held from April 02 to 12, 2024, covering Colombo, Habarana, Kandy, Nuwara Eliya, Ella, Udawalawa, Galle and Bentota. This timely important destination promotional project was organised under the SLTPB’s international media and travel influencer facilitation programmes, also known as Visiting Journalist and Blogger Programmes 2024 (VJP/VBP). Expected multiple travel content will be highlighting the island as the ideal Asian tropical holidaymaker for 2024. 

With an over 1.8 million combined global digital travel audience, this media delegation was given the opportunity of exploring both popular and emerging tourism attractions in Sri Lanka, including authentic gastronomic tour in the Central Province, hike to Katusu Konda Mountain in Kandy, exploring Ella and Uva Province, highland train ride to Demodra, visiting Vedda community in Mahiyanganaya, visit to Udawalawa elephant transit home and national parks.

By shifting from visiting usual destination highlights and exploring tourism activities, this international media and influencers delegation was engaged in a Maadu Ganga river cleaning session organised by Zero Plastic Movement along with the Safari Boat Service Providers Association in Maadu Ganga. 
The foreign media delegation was thrilled to be part of this plastic collecting session to support the effort on minimising the carbon footprint in destination Sri Lanka, where they were joined by 60 university students from the University of Colombo. 

Visiting Vedda community in Dambana was a major highlight in the programme