{"id":67934,"date":"2017-07-18T14:47:10","date_gmt":"2017-07-18T21:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=67934"},"modified":"2017-07-18T14:47:10","modified_gmt":"2017-07-18T21:47:10","slug":"direct-air-links-with-china-boosting-sri-lankas-tourism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2017\/07\/18\/direct-air-links-with-china-boosting-sri-lankas-tourism\/","title":{"rendered":"Direct air links with China boosting Sri Lanka&#8217;s tourism"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.xinhuanet.com\/english2010\/\">Xinhua<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Sri Lanka&#8217;s Tourism Minister John Amaratunga Tuesday said direct air links with China have boosted the country&#8217;s tourism market as more Chinese tourists are now choosing Sri Lanka as a holiday destination.<\/p>\n<p>Amaratunga said there are direct air links between Colombo and Chinese cities without transit and the country is expecting the tourism market from China to grow further.<\/p>\n<p>Due to the rapid growth of Chinese tourist arrivals, Sri Lanka&#8217;s national airline carrier SriLankan Airlines has recently enhanced its services for customers in China with the launch of a local direct-dial number for the airline&#8217;s customers throughout China.<\/p>\n<p>China is now one of Sri Lanka&#8217;s strongest tourist markets. A total of 271,577 Chinese tourists visited Sri Lanka in 2016, according to Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority statistics, making China the second-largest country of origin.<\/p>\n<p>Chinese arrivals have continued to grow by over 4 percent during the first five months of 2017, with 117,539 arrivals, according to the statistics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Xinhua\u00a0\u00a0 Sri Lanka&#8217;s Tourism Minister John Amaratunga Tuesday said direct air links with China have boosted the country&#8217;s tourism market as more Chinese tourists are now choosing Sri Lanka as a holiday destination. Amaratunga said there are direct air links between Colombo and Chinese cities without transit and the country is expecting the tourism market [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67934\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}