SL records over 44k tourist arrivals in Nov.

• Highest monthly arrival figure for this year
• Surpasses 100,000 cumulative arrival mark but still down almost 80% YoY
• India, UK and Russia among top three source markets

Sri Lanka recorded the highest tourist arrivals for a single month for this year in November, as the country saw the arrival of 44,294 tourists, surpassing the previous monthly high of 22,771 arrivals in October. 
The November arrivals also helped Sri Lanka to cross the 100,000 arrival mark for this year to 104,989, a significant improvement, given the pandemic but still almost 80 percent down from the arrivals of the first three months of 2020.

The Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority attributed the improvement in arrivals to “factors such as vaccination advances around the world, softer restrictions for vaccinated travellers, use of digital tools to facilitate safe travel, such as the EU COVID Certificate and growing consumer confidence in some outbound source markets”.

The largest source markets recorded for the month of November were India, the UK and Russia, followed by Germany and Pakistan.   Sri Lanka welcomed 14,236 Indian tourists, who accounted for 32.1 percent of the total arrivals, while the UK accounted for 8.5 percent or 3,770 of the total tourist arrivals. The number of Russian tourists, who visited Sri Lanka in November, was 3,520; they accounted for 7.9 percent of the total arrivals.  India, the UK, Germany, Kazakhstan and Ukraine were Sri Lanka’s top five international tourist-generating markets from January to November, this year.   All the countries, except Kazakhstan, in the top 10 markets from January to November, 2021, recorded declines in arrivals, in comparison to the same period in 2020, likely due to the persistence of the pandemic situation and new COVID-19 outbreaks around the globe, Omicrom being the most recent. 

It is noteworthy that the total arrivals up to November from Kazakhstan had recorded a growth in comparison to the total arrivals up to November 2020, likely owing to the pilot project carried out to revive the tourism industry, following a 10-month pandemic-induced closure