'Skilled staff vital to boost tourism'

The country should increase three to five star hotel capacity from the present 17,000 rooms to 45,000 rooms by 2016 to cater for 2.5 million tourists and thereby achieve the $ 3 billion target and sustain those earnings, Commercial Bank Chairman Dinesh Weerakkody told a conference on 'Balancing for the future success of tourism in Sri Lanka' organised by the Institute of Hospitality. This means we need to increase capacity by an additional 30,000 rooms, he said.

The cost of building a room according to sector experts is roughly US $ 150,000- 200,000. Therefore, the investment necessary to build 30,000 additional rooms would be around US $ 5-6 billion.

The number of skilled staff would also need to be increased from 40,000 to 126,000 by 2016 to meet the growth targets set for the industry. That means an additional 86,000 need to be trained. The training cost per skilled worker per year, is around US $ 800.

Therefore, to train an additional 86,000, it will cost the industry around US $ 70 million, he said.

Further investment would also have to be made to expand the capacity of existing hotel schools. The industry, therefore, needs to develop a new employment value proposition to attract young people to join the industry, like what the garment industry did in the 1990s and also to attract education providers through private-public partnerships to invest in the training infrastructure to deliver the skilled manpower the industry needs by 2016 and beyond. Overall, he said it was a good time for the industry with the prioritisation of travel and tourism and also because the regional prospects for tourism is the strongest for Asia and the Pacific region.