Hotel halls are converted into makeshift shelters, with 200 beds collected in city hotels.

Converting hotel halls and clubs into makeshift shelters, the Tourism Ministry has got together some 200 beds in city hotels to house tourists stranded after the weekend disaster.



Converting hotel halls and clubs into makeshift shelters, the Tourism Ministry has got together some 200 beds in city hotels to house tourists stranded after the weekend disaster.

The Ministry of Tourism will send five buses to affected areas down South to pick up tourists, with about 150 to 200 travellers on a list to be collected.

“We have also managed to get about 300 rooms at the Bandaranaike Memorial Conference Hall (BMICH) in Colombo and at the Sugathadasa Stadium,” Ministry Secretary, Dr. P. Ramunujam said Tuesday.

“We don’t have much information on Trincomalee.

Tour operators tell us that there were not many foreign tourists there, but may have been individual travellers that are difficult to account for,” Ramunujam said.

Free and Independent travellers (FIT), a high spending group, don’t travel on packaged tours but independently. About 400 tourists have already left the island after the past two days.

Flights out of the island are being re-shuffled, with flights to the tsu