Sri Lanka fears its lucrative tourism industry could see arrivals drop up to 30 per cent, with losses of USD 1.5 billion this year, after deadly Easter attacks, the finance minister said Friday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe expect a 30 per cent drop in arrivals and that means a loss of about USD 1.5 billion in foreign exchange.\u201d Samaraweera said the country could take up to two years to fully recover from Sunday\u2019s attacks, which devastated three luxury hotels and three Christian churches and killed 253 people killed, among them many foreigners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The government has blamed local Islamist extremists for the coordinated suicide bombings that shocked a nation recovering from a 37-year ethnic war that ended a decade ago.The Islamic State group said it carried out the attack and the government says it believes local extremists were at least inspired by IS militants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTypically, countries that suffer isolated IS-style attacks see tourism recovering within one-to-two years, as long as root causes are addressed and security measures taken are well communicated,\u201d the minister said.He pointed to Belgium, France, Spain and Tunisia as countries which recovered their tourism markets within a short time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Samaraweera said tourism was emerging as Sri Lanka\u2019s success story when Sunday\u2019s blast shattered hopes of reaching a revenue of USD 5.0 billion, up from last year\u2019s USD 4.4 billion.Official figures show that tourist arrivals in the first quarter of this year jumped 4.6 per cent to 740,600 from a year earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
India, Britain, and China were the biggest tourism generating markets for the island, which is known for its tropical beaches and picturesque tea-growing mountains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The industry was recovering from a severe battering during the 37-year Tamil separatist war that claimed 100,000 lives, but there had been no violence affecting tourists in the past decade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sri Lanka fears its lucrative tourism industry could see arrivals drop up to 30 per cent, with losses of USD 1.5 billion this year, after deadly Easter attacks, the finance minister said Friday. \u201cWe expect a 30 per cent drop in arrivals and that means a loss of about USD 1.5 billion in foreign exchange.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60093,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60092"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60094,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60092\/revisions\/60094"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}