• The role these unique experiential properties have to play in boosting tourism

Sri Lanka and tourism go together like bread and butter. For so many Sri Lankans, tourism is indeed their bread and butter. It is one of our biggest industries and our third-largest foreign exchange earner. The year 2018 saw Sri Lankan tourism peak at $ 5.61 billion earned from a recorded 2.5 million tourist arrivals. However, tourism has taken beating after beating these last few years, from the 2019 Easter attacks to the pandemic to our ongoing economic crisis. 

The Lankan tourism package is powerful – our island offers a mix of attractions including beaches, wildlife parks, rainforests, tea plantations, ancient ruins, multi-religious cultural sites, and festivals. Within this tourism ecosystem, we offer so many different forms of hospitality – big chain hotels, smaller chain hotels, boutique hotels, guest houses, homestays, hostels, and so much more. 

The need for Lankan tourism to reinvent itself cannot be overstated. The old strategies (especially those from before Covid-19) no longer work. But you need to know the rules to break the rules, and to reinvent ourselves, we need to know just what we have to offer. Accordingly, The Sunday Morning Brunch reached out to Mosvold Boutique Hotels Managing Director Nilanka Martinus, a pioneer of boutique hotels and small-scale hospitality for his thoughts on how Sri Lanka’s boutique hotel and small-scale hospitality space can keep itself on top in a new tourism world order. 

Mosvold Boutique Hotels is a homegrown Sri Lankan chain, specialising in ultra-luxe, design and experience-led properties on the island’s south coast. The brainchild of Nilanka and Norwegian philanthropist Kurt Mosvold, Mosvold Boutique Hotels is a truly East-meets-West collaboration.

Where we are now

Sharing his thoughts on hospitality and 2022, Nilanka first noted that at the start of 2022, things had been looking up for tourism and hospitality. Covid-19 was still certainly a concern, but with established vaccines, restrictions, and protocols, travel had resumed again. That said, even with the hangover of Covid-19, 2022’s tourism numbers were still not low. However, January 2023 has been one of the lowest Januarys on record in terms of tourism, with occupancies in hotels being 35-50% as opposed to 80% and above in the years before the pandemic. 

Moving forward, because of the pandemic and also because of other factors like the perception of Sri Lanka on the global stage, the market for tourism has shifted, Nilanka explained, and so, Sri Lankan properties also needed to shift: “The younger, innovative demographic is back into Sri Lanka, but at a much lower budget than the high-end traveller often spoke of in the country,” he said, adding: “The people paying $ 250, $ 400, or $ 500 are not here and this is because when you Google Sri Lanka, you see things like ‘no food, no medicine, no fuel’ and it sounds like a risk to travel. So, people with disposable income at that level will not come in.” 

For 2023, the key time for tourism to have made significant earnings would have been the 2022/2023 winter season, and Nilanka shared that despite Sri Lanka having had planned a last-minute winter campaign, travellers (especially the high-end travellers) would have already planned their travel in advance and picked destinations like Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines over Sri Lanka. 

“This season will be a write-off for the high-end hotels,” Nilanka opined. “The focus for us will be this coming winter season (2023/2024) provided that there is political stability in the lead-up to that time. Bookings will start coming in around August, and of course, the windows for travel have shrunk after Covid-19, which will also improve future arrivals. Research from countries has shown that travellers are up to five times more likely to travel post-Covid-19 because they value the experience and relaxation that a holiday gives them over buying luxury goods or going out in their home country.” 

The boutique hotel

This mainstream shift focusing more on experiential travel puts boutique hotels and small-scale hospitality providers in a powerful position to create value. The boutique hotel space in Sri Lanka is quite robust, but with more and more boutique and small-scale hotels opening every day, it also becomes necessary to focus on the core of what a boutique hotel is. 

“A boutique hotel is a hotel (not a villa, bungalow, etc., but a small luxury private hotel) where everything runs as a five-star hotel – departments, staffing, and so on have to be as they would in a five-star hotel, but the guests’ experience is made more individual and more private,” Nilanka explained, adding that this intimate experience reflected in the pricing of a boutique hotel’s services. “A boutique hotel has to be slightly more expensive and exclusive, and location plays a huge part. Everything is more private and exclusive than a traditional hotel would be.” 

This translates to service too. A boutique hotel’s level of service will invariably be of a higher level than a standard five-star hotel with a lot of rooms. Guests will have a dedicated staff member, like for example, their own butler, and a much greater say in the details of their hospitality experience, from the kind of food they would like to eat, to when and where they would like it served, to flexible access to spa and wellness facilities and so on. 

A boutique hotel will also offer its guests the option to be as interactive as they want, far beyond the traditional five-star experience. For example, a guest’s experience could be hands-on to the point of working directly with the chef in cooking meals personally to their own recipe, or hands-off to the point where they are left entirely alone by staff until called upon. 

It is this customer-centric flexibility and privacy that are hallmarks of the boutique hotel experience. For example, one of Mosvold’s key boutique hotels, Sundara, a mansion in Balapitiya modelled after the concept of ‘a stay at the head of the village’s mansion,’ offers an experience of that intimate feeling of being a guest at a luxuriously-appointed country home complete with staff to cater to your every need. Ahead of Valentine’s Day, Sundara has curated special experiences for couples including mini BBQs on the beach (for two) and private boat rides. 

“From enjoying a bottle of champagne on your own private boat, to gourmet tapas customised to you, and even a curated beachside dinner, our focus as purveyors of luxury is the experience of slow, immersive travel, which is ideal for Valentine’s Day,” Nilanka said, and this kind of personalised, exclusive guest experience is what sets apart the boutique hotel from other small-scale hotel-driven tourism models. 

Boutique hotels and 2023 tourism

The shift to experiential travel is global. Even in Eastern and Southern Europe (where countries like Croatia and Italy are popular travel destinations), there is a shift away from the somewhat cookie-cutter experience that large hotels provide to the smaller, more experiential hospitality options like Airbnbs, smaller hotels and cottages, and boutique hotels, with the location of these places playing a huge part in making them stand out. For example, travellers are less likely to be interested in hotels, even smaller ones, that are ‘on the strip’ so to speak – located in a busy hotel hotspot next to and amidst other hotels. 

Sri Lanka has the advantage here. “Sri Lanka is Asia’s last frontier,” Nilanka stressed. “Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines are gone. They have been tourism destinations for many more years than we have and have now fallen into the trap of mass tourism. We can actually learn a lot of lessons from them if we look at them properly. Sri Lanka can easily develop as a very experiential peak tourist destination.”

Even within the bigger cities around the island that are tourism hotspots and feature a ‘hotel strip’ of sorts, Sri Lanka’s natural diversity makes it so that there are any number of unique and intimate experiential properties around any city, as is evidenced by the wide variety of small-scale and boutique hotels you can find in any part of the island. 

What needs to happen now is more of a focus on the smaller, more heavily experiential hospitality options as opposed to the development of the big chain hotels, some of which have already noticed this global shift in the travel mindset and are acquiring smaller properties to provide their interpretation of the boutique hotel experience to travellers. Nilanka noted: “When the big guys are doing it, you know they have the data to back it up.” 

What is most important, even outside the question of big chains versus small-scale, Nilanka highlighted, was to recognise that even with the current economic crisis, tourism was the fastest way to bring in cash and foreign currency. “All tourists have to spend money and we need to understand that we are competing for those tourists with much bigger destinations with much bigger budgets that have the thinking and leadership to put their brands in front of their clients. For us, that issue needs to be addressed. 

“A global promotion hasn’t been done in so many years. I remember when we put ‘Visit Sri Lanka’ on cabs and buses in the UK, there was a spike in arrivals that year. That campaign brought us traction. Even after the Easter bombings, though it was negative, it was still publicity, and January and February the following year saw the highest we had had within our group ever. That was because Sri Lanka was top of mind, and even though there was a risk and negative publicity, they still came. 

“We have to really focus on how we are taking Sri Lanka to the world. It can be done in many ways on a small scale individually by local hotel brands and travel companies, but will be vastly more effective when done in a more focused manner using a national global promotion campaign.”

For more information on Mosvold Hotels and their offerings, please visit mosvoldhotels.com