Abstract:
Purchasing a tourism product is different from purchasing a consumer good. Tourism product
contains of attributes such as service, experience, persuasion, involvement, and most
importantly revisit. Destinations are supposed to fulfill all those desires of each and every
visitor. Eventually, needs and wants of visitors have shown dynamic changes due to
competition among destinations. In today’s saturated markets customers look for experience
rather than destination driven products. The creation of experience should consist of
entertainment, educational, aesthetics and escapist elements. Theoretically, a product has an s -
curve with stages of growth, maturity, saturation and decline in sales and profits and it seems
to hold true even for tourism products imposing that product development and new product
innovations is important in tourism. Sri Lanka is marketed for nature based tourism, cultural
tourism and historical tourism. In a highly competitive market those elements are not enough
to stay competitive. Therefore, this research study intended to explore possible new product
development for the tourism industry of Sri Lanka. The Quantitative approach has been
employed in this research. 70 online questionnaires were administered to iden tify tourist
satisfaction with regard to existing tourism products. Findings of this study revealed that the
visitor satisfaction for activities for kids, organized excursions, traditional dance and music,
and for contact with local communities is at a lower level. Following niche product
developments are proposed to make tourism a larger contributor to the economy: Galle fort
trishaw ride, temple stay, honeymoon packages , thatched houses and performance of
traditional music and dance.
