National carrier SriLankan ventures into hotel industry as tourism booms in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka's national carrier SriLankan Airlines plans to enter into the hotel industry according to its Chairman Nishantha Wickremasinghe.


The government media unit citing Wickremasinghe said the SriLankan Airlines is to build a tourist hotel near the main Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) at Katunayake.
The planned site for the hotel is right across the departure lounge of the BIA. The airline has obtained an is reportedly abandoned factory in the export processing zone near the international airport and plans to convert it into a hotel with at least 125 rooms.
According to Wickremasinghe, the national carrier is also planning to double its fleet and add new destinations. As a first step in the expansion, the carrier just took the delivery of a new Airbus aircraft on Tuesday received
The tourism industry has seen a surge in tourist arrivals with the end of the decades-long conflict in May 2009 necessitating the need for more hotel rooms to accommodate the incoming tourists.
The tourist arrivals have been steadily increasing since the end of the war and recent data from the Tourist Board has shown that Sri Lanka's tourist arrivals jumped by 48.4 percent until June 2010 compared to a year earlier. Tourist arrivals rose nearly 48 percent in June to 44,730 from a year ago.
The hotels in the country are in a race with time to provide more accommodation and facilities to the anticipated influx of tourists to the country.
The Tourism Board says it is hoping to attract 2.5 million visitors by 2016 and to earn 2 billion-dollar annual income from tourism by 2016.