SriLankan Airlines, the national carrier of Sri Lanka, is expanding its flight operations to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries from Colombo and further diversifying its wide range of products and services in order to cash in on the increase in tourist inflow.
“From December 23, the airline will be operating two additional flights from Colombo to Muscat, thereby increasing its total frequency to the Sultanate to four weekly flights.
Recently, we have increased flights from Doha to Colombo from five to seven a week. Now, we plan to operate daily flights from Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Kuwait and are also trying to increase the number of flights to five between Colombo and Riyadh and Jeddah,” Lal Perera, SriLankan Airlines regional manager for Middle East and Africa, announced at a Press conference here.
The flights to Muscat from Colombo will be operated on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
According to the official, Sri Lanka has witnessed a 43.2 per cent increase in passengers coming to Colombo from GCC countries.
“Till the end of November in 2011, at least 85,990 people had visited Sri Lanka from the GCC countries,” Perera added.
In 2010, at least 60,109 people had visited Sri Lanka and the airline is providing convenient connections to its global route network of 60 destinations in 33 countries in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Far East, North America and Australia.
Meanwhile, the airline’s Oman manager Lakshman Weerasooriya said: “The increase in number of flights will help the Indian diaspora in the GCC countries.
They can benefit from SriLankan Airlines’ 77 flights, which is operated every week to seven cities in India. During the last five years, the fares to Colombo from GCC countries had dropped to almost 50 per cent.”
The airline recently embarked on a complete overhaul of its cabin interiors of it fleet. The new look will have a subtle, traditional Sir Lankan aura, to its plus interiors and a new state of art entertainment system, in a complete overhaul of its fleet cabins, scheduled to be completed by July, 2012.
According to the Sri Lankan government’s official news portal, Sri Lanka celebrated the arrival of 800,000th tourist yesterday.
At the beginning of 2011, Sri Lanka Tourism launched their marketing campaign named as ‘Refreshingly Sri Lanka – Visit 2011’, with the aim of showcasing Sri Lanka as an island of new found freedom; a place where the visitor can experience everything that is refreshing under the sun.
With this new branding, Sri Lanka tourism promoted eight segments encapsulating eight wonderful experiences a tourist can enjoy within eight days.
“The dawn of peace in our country is luring more and more tourists,” Lakshman noted.
