Island Draw:
Sri Lanka to lease islands for hotels
Sri Lanka plans to lease islands off the north-west coast for tourist hotels, as the travel industry recovers after the end of the 30-year ethnic war, government officials said.
Tourism promotion minister Faiszer Musthapha said the government will soon advertise the lease of five islands in the Kalpitiya lagoon region which is being developed as a new up-market tourist resort complex.
The tourism promotion ministry and investment promotion ministry were already holding talks with international hotel investors on new projects in the country, he told a news conference.
The end of the war in May, when government forces defeated the Tamil Tiger rebels, has generated a lot of interest in Sri Lanka’s tourism sector among international investors and hotel operators, he told a news conference.
The first such project was announced at the news conference recently.
The international luxury hotel chain Six Senses is to operate a six-star boutique resort on an island in Kalpitiya to be built by a group of foreign investors, Musthapha said.
Bernard Goonetilleke, chairman of the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau, said 4,000 rooms are to be built under the Kalpitiya tourism project.
Previous fears that such a large number of rooms being added might lead to overcapacity at a time when existing hotels were struggling to fill their rooms had evaporated with the end of the war, he said.
“We now wonder whether 4,000 rooms will be enough to meet increasing demand,” he said.
Sri Lanka has seen an upturn in tourist arrivals with the end of the war and hotels are anticipating full houses in the forthcoming winter season.
The Kalpitiya region is a new region for tourism development left largely untouched because of the war.
Most beach resort development has been on Sri Lanka’s south-west and southern coasts.
The government is now also trying to attract investors to build hotels in the east, known for some of the country’s best beaches, Goonetilleke said.
Dileep Mudadeniya, managing director of the Tourism Promotion Bureau, said the new hotels earmarked for Kalpitiya would be up-market ones with the aim of attracting high-spending tourists.
“The rooms will be priced over 350 dollars each,” he said. “The project will also create thousands of jobs.”