Tourist arrivals in Feb. first week top 19,000

• Cumulative arrivals cross 100,000 mark
• Daily arrival average for Feb. crosses 3,000
• Russia, India and UK remain largest source markets for the year so far 

The tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka in the first week of February reached 19,000, bringing the year-to-date daily arrivals to a 2,738 average. 
The provisional data from the Tourism Ministry released yesterday showed that from February 1 to 6, the island nation welcomed a total of 19,013 tourists. 

 For the arrivals so far for the month, the daily average of incoming tourists is 3,168. 
The total arrivals for the year 2022, as of February 6, is 101,340.  In 2021, tourist arrivals crossed the 100,000 mark only by the end of November, where the January-November 2021 cumulative total was 104,989.  The largest source market for Sri Lanka for the January 1 to February 6, 2022 period is Russia, which accounted for 16.15 percent of the total number of arrivals.  India ranked as the second largest source market, with 13.65 percent of the arrivals and the UK ranked as the third largest tourist traffic generator for Sri Lanka, accounting for 9.51 percent of the total arrivals. 
Sri Lanka tourism is reaping the benefits of countries across the world removing the travel bans and relaxing the travel restrictions for fully vaccinated passengers.
Although the rapid spread of the new COVID-19 variant Omicron did result in a minor slowdown in global travel in January, the momentum remains largely undisrupted.