Sri Lanka tourist arrivals up 13.6 -pct in October 2014

Nov 07, 2014 (LBO) - Sri Lanka's tourist arrivals rose 13.6 percent to 121,576 in October 2014 from a year earlier, driven by India, UK and China data from the state tourism promotion office showed. Visitors from Western Europe were up 10.1 percent 32,061 in the month with UK up 2.7 percent and Germany up 23.8 percent to 7,966.

Eastern European arrivals were down 10.3 percent to 11,365 with Russia up 4.0 percent to 5,512, But Ukraine was down 52.4 percent to 2,181.

Middle Eastern visitors were up 0.6 percent to 8,840 with arrivals from Saudi Arabis up 0.04 percent to 2,652 and UAE down 10.4 percent to 968 while Oman was up 64.9 percent to 849.

Sri Lanka targets 1.5 million tourist arrivals for the year 2014 with the key focus of achieving 2.5 million of tourists in the end of 2016.

In the nine months of 2014 arrivals were up 21.5 percent to 1,228,754.

South Asian visitors were down 10.7 percent to 35,718 compared to the same month last year with arrivals from India, Sri Lanka’s top market, up 19.8 percent to 26,148.

Visitors from Maldives were down 0.04 percent to 6,460 and Pakistan was down 33.0 percent to 1,725.

Arrivals form United Kingdom, the second bigge