Walkers invests Rs.5 M on revamped booking site

Walkers Tours has revamped its booking website investing Rs.5 million to develop it to attract Sri Lankans to some of the best hotel deals in the island.

The Walkers Tours website titled cvisit.com, considered to be Sri Lanka’s premier online travel brand, will serve to attract Sri Lankans to some of the best hotel deals investing approximately Rs.5 million in developing the product, Walkers Tours CEO Nalaka Amaratunga said in an interview with the Business Times on Friday.

He noted that they had been able to attract about 50 hotels to display their hotel deals which would be excluding the credit card offers and discounts of upto 45 per cent.

Walkers Tours would also be investing a further Rs.2.5 million in a marketing campaign scheduled to commence from next month with the aim of increasing awareness about the website and generating more traffic to tap on the hotel deals on offer, he explained.

cvisit.com was a brand initially started out in 2015 but stopped functioning in November due to certain practical issues, Mr. Amaratunga said.

As a result Walkers Tours was compelled to re-strategise and re-brand the product and the website resumed operations this year with a soft launch this week, he explained.

This would be a purely leisure related one-stop-shop with products solely for Sri Lankan travelers, Mr. Amaratunga said.

He pointed out that today Sri Lankas form at least 30-40 per cent of the hotel business and as a result they believed it would be beneficial to tap this market as most locals were touring the country.

As a booking website based in Colombo it would also provide travelers with the ability to book their transport options and excursions if necessary alongside the hotel bookings made online.

With competition from other websites that offer deals like wow.lk, mydeal.lk and ikman.lk, Walker Tours will focus mostly on the leisure segment and in future would also provide holiday packages and domestic air transport offers as well.