Travel bloggers conference brings huge dividends to Sri Lanka
Some 250 people including 45 travel bloggers from across the world, met in Sri Lanka last week for the Asia's First Ever Travel Bloggers Conference - TBCasia 2014 organised by Cinnamon Hotels and Resorts in partnership with SriLankan Airlines.
The participants include Allison Busaca, Global Editor of BBC Travel, who in a keynote address spoke on the huge strides made by travel bloggers in transforming the way tourism works today.
Separately in a brief interview with the Business Times at the Cinnamon Lakeside Tuesday conference, she said the bloggers event in which these 45 writers visited many parts of the island and wrote about its diversity, was a great way to profile the country.
“This is my first visit to Sri Lanka and it’s a great place,” the US-based journalist said adding, “Your biggest asset is your people. They smile and take natural pride in loving, caring and being themselves. There is a lot of diversity and locations in close proximity”. Being in the business of social media, Facebook, tweets and other avenues, the week-long event drew millions of comments, impressions and posts on Tweeter, Instagram and other media – gaining a lot of mileage for Sri Lanka. The positive social media avalanche on Sri Lanka drew anxious protests from anti-government groups overseas - concerned that foreign bloggers were profiling the country in a positive way-, who said the Rajapaksa regime had violated the human rights of people and was a corrupt administration.
Among the millions of tweets which focused on the country and the travel blogging business in general, were: “The Sri Lankan countryside is amazing: Good content doesn’t have to be long. It needs to tell a story and be impactful: People are getting lazy to read so good short content always goes down well: 43 per cent of vacation goers use social media to tell about their trip to their friends. Social media marketing matters in travel industry: Congratulations to Sri Lanka for understanding the value and importance of travel blogs to the travel and tourism industry.” On behalf of Cinnamon Hotels & Resorts, Ajit Gunewardene, Deputy Chairman of John Keells Holdings, welcomed Tuesday’s gathering and said: "The idea to host this conference has been under discussion for about a year and many thought it was too ambitious considering the fact that a conference of this nature has never been done before. That was exactly what we needed to hear to go ahead and do it." Among the group of speakers at the conference were key representatives of Google South Asia, TripAdvisor, Times of London, Four GB PR, Revinate and TravelClick were present together with the Professional Travel Bloggers and Digital marketing experts. Dileep Mudadeniya, JKH’s Vice President of Brand Marketing was one of the key players in driving home the importance of social media and initiating this event and other events that has energised the Cinnamon brand of hotels.