Sri Lanka tourist earnings up 26-pct to October 2013

Sri Lanka tourist earnings up 26-pct to October 2013

Sri Lanka has earned 996.2 million US dollars from tourism services in the ten months to October 2013, up 26% from a year earlier(2012), data released by the Central Bank showed.
Tourism arrivals rose 16.8% to 904,015 in the same period.
The average stay has moved up 10.5 nights from 10 a year earlier, he said.

Last year Sri Lanka was estimated to have earned 1,038 million US dollars from tourism up 25.1 percent from a year earlier with 1,005,605 tourists coming to the island.

This year Sri Lanka targeted 1.2 million tourists with an ambitious 1.5 billion US dollars in revenues.
Tourism is an export of services and is one of the factors that contribute to a country's merchandise trade deficit when the received dollars are spent.
Don S Jayaweera, director general of the Sri Lanka's tourist authority told a business forum in Colombo last month that the average spend per day by a tourist was 109 dollars this year up from 65 in 2009.