Srilankan Tourism (SLT): A Forecast of Foreign Tourists (FFT)
Tourism has become a popular global leisure activity. Srilankan tourism has beaches, Archeological Sites, National Parks, Elephants, Adventure Sports and Precious stone mining. Sri Lanka has 39 tourist attractions all over the island. The International media reports published about the improvements in tourism industry of January 2008 by 0.6%, March 2008 by 8.6% when comparing to last year’s (2007) figures. The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and the past civil war have reduced tourist arrivals but Sri Lanka received over half a million tourists in 2006. Number of tourists’ arrival was 559600 in the year 2006. From secondary data analysis and literature review, research problem exists on two important variables such as period (year) and tourist (number of tourists’ arrivals to Sri Lanka). Objectives of this research are to know the relationship between years and number of tourists’ arrivals and to forecast number of tourist arrivals during the next five years. Target population are those who visit to Sri Lanka as foreign tourist. Number of foreign tourists is known from secondary data. Since the study involved entire target population there was no need to select sample of foreign tourists visiting Sri Lanka. Researcher concentrated on all foreign tourists as a target population study. Data were collected using secondary source. SPSS with the version of 16.0 and Excell 2007 were used as an analytical tool fordata presentation & analysis. Scatter plot showed that number of tourists who visited to Sri Lanka have increased from early 2001 to 2004. There were a slight declined number of tourists in the year 2005 than year 2004. A further decline started from 2006 to 2008. Number of tourists increased from 2009 onwards. Minimum and maximum tourists who visited to Sri Lanka were 336800 and 654477during the last decade. Totally, 5,340,977 tourists have arrived Sri Lanka. 486,000 tourists have come to Sri Lanka on an average basis. Pearson Correlation indicates the value of 0
