New look Tourism Awards on 27 May

By Cheranka Mendis

Sri Lanka Tourism is set to launch yet another tourism excellence awards recognising the efforts of the industry stakeholders; but this time with a name change.

Hosted for the fourth consecutive year the award presentation was previously called the Presidential Awards for Travel and Tourism. From this year on the award presentation will go as ‘Sri Lanka Tourism Awards.’

Tourism officials yesterday stated that the name change was a policy decision to align local industry activity with the likes of Singapore and Thailand which organise similar awards.

Director Product Development and Events Upali de Silva stated that the event will recognise the work of more companies and individuals this time compared to the years before. New categories have been added to widen the scope of competition with 53 awards with special focus on MICE tourism. Planned to be held on 27 May at Waters Edge Battaramulla, the organisers have received up to 100 entries for now which, de Silva said was a giant step ahead compared to the numbers received in 2010.

“We only received 50 to 60 applications last year. Therefore the 100 we received is a considerably important move.”

Furthermore he asserted that the award ceremony would be conducted under a revamped structure which would enable the transparency of the process, depth in judgment, align categories with Sri Lanka Development Authority classifications and make room for the inclusion of new categories.

The new categories introduced are the awards for outstanding contribution to tourism, tourism entrepreneur of the year, leisure attraction of the year, awards for home stay units, tourism restaurants, tour operation in non-traditional emerging market — under tour operator Free and Independent Traveller also known as FIT and tour operator, award for conference and exhibition, best tourism website & print media presentation, and Chef of the year award.           

President of Tourist Hotels Association Anura Lokuhetty stated that such competitions were necessary to encourage hoteliers to up their standards in order to achieve the 2.5 million target successfully. “We are very happy about the 2.5 million tourists by 2016 target. Working towards achieving this, it is important to encourage hoteliers to improve their products and add value addition to their services.