ISSUES AND CHALLENGES ON DEVELOPING AND PROMOTING RAMAYANA TRAIL TOURISM IN SRI LANKA

This study has been conducted related to the Ramayana tourism concept in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau has launched the Ramayanaya Trail with the private sector to target the top-ranked Indian market over to Sri Lanka for religious reasons and other travel purposes. With the literature shreds of evidence by Ramayana epic Sri Lanka has significant cultural value on Ramayana trail with more than 50 relevant sites. With the findings of previous studies related to the Ramayana trail in the Sri Lankan context and surveys by local travel agents, there is no considerable popularity for the Ramayana trails sites among Indian tourists who visited Sri Lanka. Thus, the study has focused on developing and promoting issues of Ramayana tourism in the Sri Lankan context. The study was conducted under the qualitative approach to achieve the research objective to identify the issues and challenges of developing and promoting Ramayana trail as a cultural tourism product in Sri Lanka under the case study research design by considering Ramayana tourism in Sri Lanka as a case. The qualitative interview method was conducted by the snowball sampling method among Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau and 20 local tour operators and filed observations in 11 Ramayana sites in Sri Lanka were done as the primary data collection. Core issues and challenges have been identified under two categories as site-based and organizational-based.