Interdisciplinary Conference of Management Researchers - 2020 http://repo.lib.sab.ac.lk:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/39 2026-04-19T15:52:21Z 2026-04-19T15:52:21Z Gnanapala, Athula C. http://repo.lib.sab.ac.lk:8080/xmlui/handle/susl/2409 2022-09-12T09:37:42Z 2020-11-26T00:00:00Z

ICMR 2020 Gnanapala, Athula C.

2020-11-26T00:00:00Z Munasinghe, S Kulathunga, K. http://repo.lib.sab.ac.lk:8080/xmlui/handle/susl/2408 2022-09-14T03:28:28Z 2020-11-26T00:00:00Z

SURVIVING IN AND RECOVERING FROM THE COVID-19 IMPACTS BY SRI LANKAN HOMESTAY OPERATORS Munasinghe, S; Kulathunga, K. The Covid-19 pandemic paused international tourism posing millions of tourism businesses a historical challenge of surviving and recovering. Tourism businesses in Sri Lanka are composed 60% of small and medium-scale businesses (SMEs), including homestay operators. For this segment of business, surviving and recovering is even a challenge as many businesses represent informal sector and some of them are not registered businesses. As a result, these businesses face difficulties in obtaining benefits from relief packages offered by the government. However, the way tourism businesses survive during crises is not well explored. Accordingly, this research focuses on homestay businesses and interested in exploring those business operators’ 1) survival strategies during the shut-down period caused by COVID 19, 2) experience of and satisfaction with social and governmental supports that they received, and 3) recovery strategies planned for in the post COVID tourism scenario. This research is significant given the fact that not many researchers have inquired into exploring lived experiences of tourism operators’ survival and recovery strategies in the face of crisis. In Sri Lankan context, limited research can be found in relation to the issues and challenges faced by SMEs when recovering from crises, except for a limited research related to recovering from Tsunami disaster in 2004. A qualitative explorative research approach is proposed as this inquiry requires exploring personal interpretations of respondents’ experiences, strategies adopted, and recovery plans. This research expects to make theoretical contribution to the knowledge regarding the survival and recovery strategies of tourism SMEs during the times of crisis. The knowledge generated can have implications in making plans for preparing SMEs for facing crisis situations in tourism.

2020-11-26T00:00:00Z Amaresh, M. Anandasayanan, S. http://repo.lib.sab.ac.lk:8080/xmlui/handle/susl/2407 2022-09-12T09:16:39Z 2020-11-26T00:00:00Z

A TREND ANALYSIS BASED ON TOURIST MARKET PROFILE DATA OF SRI LANKA Amaresh, M.; Anandasayanan, S. Tourism has been playing a key role in global economy while creating employment opportunities, generating export revenue and adding value to the domestic resources. It has become a fastest growing sector and important economic sector across the globe, specifically in developing countries such as Sri Lanka. The international tourist arrival was 1.4 billion and international tourism export was US$ 1.7 trillion (SLTDA annual report, 2018). As per SLTDA monthly report 2019, the total number of international tourists to Sri Lanka was 1913702 in 2019. This study aimed to analyze the overall trends in tourist arrivals and to identify the recent trends in profile characteristics of tourist arrivals in Sri Lanka. Overall trends delineated in this article are based on the statistical data from 2000 to 2019.The prominent features of tourists such as age, gender, occupation, period of stay and purpose of visit were analyzed by employing three year moving average method and regression analysis with the help of MS Excel. Analyzing the trends is important for creating demand for hotel accommodation, economic development, job creation and infrastructure development by the government. Pleasure/holiday and visiting friends are the only two purposes of visit of tourists that showed increasing trend. In age group, 60 years and over, 50-59 years and 20-29 years showed an increasing trend and 50-59 age group indicated a remarkable increasing trend during the study period. Further, the investigation confirmed that female tourist arrival showed a significant increasing trend whereas male tourist arrival showed decreasing trend. The trend of period of stay depicted that international visitors preferred to stay lengthy nights in Sri Lanka as the periods of stay 22- 30 nights, 15-21 nights, 31 nights and more. Further, 4-7 nights and 8-14 nights showed increasing trend and remarkably 15-21 nights stay of tourists increased. The present study also concluded that only retired person category is showing a low and increasing trend

2020-11-26T00:00:00Z Sewwandi, N.A.N. Dinesha, P.K.C http://repo.lib.sab.ac.lk:8080/xmlui/handle/susl/2406 2022-09-12T09:10:24Z 2020-11-26T00:00:00Z

INFLUENCE OF ONLINE CUSTOMER REVIEWS ON HOTEL BOOKING INTENTION: WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO SRI LANKA TOUR PACKAGES Sewwandi, N.A.N.; Dinesha, P.K.C Modern tourism is focused in developing and encompassing a growing number of new destinations. These factors have made tourism as one of the key drivers in socio-economic progress. Normally consumers don’t like to perceive more risks which associated with purchasing tourism services because they cannot easily evaluate tourism destinations and services before they make the consumption due to intangibility and heterogeneity of tourism services. But with the development of web 2.0 applications, consumer-generated media has increased transforming word-of-mouth communications into different types of electronic communities allowing tourists to gain information on different destinations and hotels easier. But when it comes to Sri Lankan context, there is lack of information on how tourists use these indicators of online customer reviews to make their purchase decisions. Having recognized this knowledge gap, this study was designed to investigate the influence of consumer online reviews on hotel booking intention of Sri Lanka tour packages. Online reviews, the independent variable divide into five dimensions and examined the influence of the consumer online reviews on dependent variable, with reference to Sri Lanka tour packages. Primary data collected through a well structured questionnaire. Researcher selected 100 respondents (both male and female) who have booked tour packages in Sri Lanka depending on or not online consumer reviews. Regression analysis used to examine impacts of these attributes upon travelers’ online booking intention. Five features of online reviews contents were identified namely Valence, Usefulness, Timeliness, Comprehensiveness and Volume. Regression analysis results testified positive relationship between Valence, Timeliness and respondents’ online booking intention. A negative relationship was identified between Volume, Usefulness, Comprehensiveness and online booking intention. Comprehensiveness in examining features of review content is a major theoretical contribution of this study. This study also generated areas worthy of more research efforts for practitioners and researchers.

2020-11-26T00:00:00Z