Sri Lanka is as safe as any tourist place in the world. The island nation is welcoming tourists to experience its hospitality and soak in the vast leisure spots, says Richard Nuttall, chief executive officer of SriLankan Airlines. In an interaction with B Krishna Mohan, he tells about the airline plans and tourist revival happening.
Excerpts:
Priorities
We operate in nine cities in India currently. We now connect Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Thiruvananthapuram, Trichy, Kochi and Madurai. We also operate a seasonal flight to Varanasi. India is an important market for Sri Lanka. We were the first foreign airline to fly 100 flights a week here. That was before Covid.
Covid impact and unrest
During Covid, obviously everything stopped. We were building back and then things stopped a little bit last year with some news of unrest coming out of Sri Lanka about 15 months ago. I should stress it was in one area and it was contained quickly. The travel advisories against Sri Lanka were global double standards. The reality is if you visit Sri Lanka you would be just as safe as in any other global city. Sri Lanka was always and is a safe place for tourists. Although Sri Lanka was always fine as a destination, it was just that it didn't always come out that way in the media. What we are really trying to do is build back to where we were. So, tourism traffic to Sri Lanka is now back to about 60-70% of what it was before Covid. The currency devalued due to economic challenges that the country had. It means others get a better value. But that makes travel to Sri Lanka from other countries cheaper. (One Indian Rupee is now about 3.91 Sri Lankan rupees). Now is the perfect time to visit.
India
India is a key market for us. However, it is perhaps lagging the rest of the world by a month or two in terms of the rebound of tourist numbers. That could be due to more media coverage of Sri Lanka here. But it is now coming back quite quickly. India is now the number one source of tourists for Sri Lanka. But given that India is next door, and given that it has a population of 1.4 billion people, we actually think the market here is much bigger. We used to do 40,000 passengers a month from India to Sri Lanka. Now, it is about 25,000. But we really think we ought to be able to get that up to 1,00,000 a month in about two or three years. Holiday seasons see traffic peaks. Tourism directly or indirectly supports two million people in Sri Lanka. The country was stable and witnessed over 8,00,000 tourists during the first seven months of the current year with the majority from India.
Fleet
The current fleet is 23. We plan to get back to 27, which was our pre-Covid fleet by the middle of next year. By the end of five years, we expect it to go up to 36-40. We don't go out and buy new aircraft. We get them on lease. We will wait till we get the right aircraft. We have our own MRO that looks after aircraft. We expect operations to turn profitable this fiscal on the back of a buoyed aviation market post-Covid-19 pandemic. Efforts are on to reduce our debt.
Experience
Passenger safety is a priority. The airline industry is highly regulated, which means that every flight has to go through strict routine checks. There is a set system on every part of the airplane, the amount of flights it does, the amount of hours and so on. Each part has a timeframe after which it has to be replaced anyway. Safety related aspects are monitored seriously.
Service
We have multiple food choices. We have duty-free sales which the passengers can pre-order. In terms of cultural closeness and hospitality, Sri Lanka will be ahead of anyone else outside of India. We now have more people travelling from India to Sri Lanka. We will try to improve the outbound traffic too from Sri Lanka.
Preferences
We have tourism from here to Sri Lanka. The main segment is the pilgrimage in Sri Lanka. Many visit the Shakti Peetam in Trincomalee. There is Sita Amman temple. There is also Anjaneya temple. Apart from the religious circuit, we have many leisure spots.
Airfares
We have a dynamic airfares structure. They start from Rs 22,600. The flying time from Hyderabad to Sri Lanka is 1hr 50 minutes. We have various travel packages and tourists typically stay four nights. From India, we have more flights from Chennai. So, the volume from that is high. In two to three years, we want to have 11 to 14 flights a week from major cities from the current six flights a week.
