POLICY IMPLEMENTATION ON REBUILDING SRI LANKAN TOURISM INDUSTRY DURING POST COVID-19 PANDEMIC PERIOD FROM 2019 TO 2023

Tourism industry acts as an engine of growth in Sri Lanka which links so many other sectors in the economy. With the unprecedented crisis of COVID-19, tourism and its networked sectors were severely affected. Many researchers have studied the impact of the pandemic on different sectors including the tourism industry. Despite having all those, it was identified that there is a little amount of researches have been done on the strategies and governmental policies which have been implemented by the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL), Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL), Sri Lanka Tourist Development Authority (SLTDA) and the Board of Investment of Sri Lanka (BOI) to rebuild the Sri Lankan tourism industry. Hence, this study aims to study the policy implementation in Sri Lanka towards the tourism industry during the post-pandemic period using the secondary data from the sources of SLTDA, BOI and so on. Mainly, mixed research method was used into this study where quantitative data analyzed the performance of tourism industry through descriptive analysis and qualitative data analyzed the policies that were implemented during post-pandemic period. Findings of the study reveals that the tourist arrivals, tourist receipts, food and accommodation and both direct and indirect employment opportunities of tourism industry was severely hindered by the COVID-19 pandemic with rigorous decline of their performance until 2021. In 2022, they achieved rapid increase implementing policies such as granting debt moratorium, providing Saubagya COVID-19 Renaissance Facility and Jaya Isura loan scheme to provide working capital for enterprises in tourism industry, granting visa-free entry for visitors from seven countries, developing domestic tourism in parallel to the promotion of international tourism and so on. Yet, Sri Lankan tourism industry is needed to adapt advanced technology and effective marketing strategies in order to solve the issues that faced during the pandemic period.