The Sri Lanka tourism promotions bureau chief Rohantha Athukorala voiced at the inauguration of the Sri Lankan Pavilion on day one of the premier travel and tourism exhibition IBT in Berlin, we must not just play lip service to the ethos Private-Public partnership in the tourism industry but really work on a day to day basis.

On the advice of the minister of tourism we are launching a new business model where apart from the short and medium term tourism strategy that has been agreed by the ministry and the board of directors a monthly partnership model will done to play as a policy he said.

The monthly meeting will be initially at the tourism industry level where in each focus market- India, UK, China, Germany, France and Italy the top private-public sector stakeholders will analyze the visitor arrivals of last month and the bookings for the next three months and then the agreement on the promotional support in the near future with the tweaking will be discussed and agree for activation said Athukorala. This will give a great flexibility to understand the changes in the market place and what responses we need to have from Sri Lanka he said. Dr Athukorala headed the same mechanism as the 1st executive director of the National Council For Economic Development- NCED and he said this best practice will now be modeled to the Tourism industry for greater engagement and institutionalization of the working arrangement he said.

At the 2nd level we will have national meeting between the pivotal brand Sri Lanka development model between Sri Lanka tourism, tea board promotional arm and Sri Lankan airlines together with the Sri Lanka export development board said Athukorala so that synergies can be worked out for stronger brand promotions at a country level. This will be a high level meeting where the overall promotional budget will exceed a 10- 15 billion rupees. Once the structure is in play we will link to the national policy landing unit of the country just like the global best practices in Singapore and Malaysia voiced Athukoarala.