Foreign minister spies mutual benefits from Sri Lanka tourism appeal

Rising international interest in the Sri Lankan  tourism market is expected to have mutual benefits for the Maldives travel industry, Ahmed Naseem, the country’s Foreign Affairs Minister has claimed.

Haveeru reported Naseem as stating during a visit to Sri Lanka that the two tourism markets had the potential to complement each other well in their individual aims of trying to attract a wider number of visitors.

He added therefore that working to offer a greater number of joint travel packages between Sri Lanka and the Maldives was seen as a lucrative development that was currently under consideration by authorities.

Preliminary tourism statistics for the first three months of 2011 have suggested that arrival numbers were up by 12.3 percent over the same period the previous year, with 246,606 visitors coming to the country.