‘Being best is good, telling the world is better’

By Marianne David

The head of the country’s best five star city hotel this week made a fresh case for effective and aggressive marketing of Sri Lanka as a holiday destination to maximise benefits from unique advantages and peaceful times.

“Sometimes you can be the best, but if nobody knows about it, you’re not going to be successful. It’s the marketing of it that will be important and it should be a combined effort between the private and the public sector to be able to achieve results,” Cinnamon Lakeside Colombo General Manager Denis Gruhier told journalists on Tuesday.

The importance of marketing was highlighted during a briefing on key attributes of Cinnamon Lakeside’s success in winning the Best Five Star City Hotel for the second consecutive year at the Sri Lanka Tourism awards.

“Diversity that Sri Lanka offers that not many other countries can claim. It’s not only the beaches in Sri Lanka that are beautiful; it’s also the wildlife and the culture that you find in Sri Lanka that is really something major which we must promote much more,” Gruhier said.

“The second thing – and maybe I should have said it first, and I say it because I mean it and I am living it – is the people. The people in Sri Lanka are wonderful people. They are genuinely warm and I insist on the word genuine. A lot of people are warm in this world, but in Asia you will increasingly see people who are commercially warm. Here we feel the sincerity in being warm; I see it in my team every day. The people are warm and keen on pleasing the guests and that is something that is truly irreplaceable and I genuinely wish Sri Lanka keeps that spirit for as long as it can because that will be the key of success for this country. After that you can focus on everything else, such as infrastructure,” the Cinnamon Lakeside General Manager added.