A Customer Relationship Management System for the MICE industry in Sri Lanka – “MICESL”

Abstract

Sri Lankan Tourism is a rapidly growing industry that has stepped into sponsoring other prospects in the industry over the past year. A significant segment within the tourism industry is MICE Tourism, which refers to Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions. MICE Tourism is an industry that entices revenue to the host country. However, the Sri Lankan MICE industry is unable to accumulate the total revenue from MICE activities, resulting in a negative impact to the growth of the country. Therefore, the research focus was on the impact of Sri Lankan service industry and destination image on MICE Tourism. The aim of this research was to build a web based framework, in order to effectively support, Sri Lankan MICE industry. Therefore, a detailed literature survey was conducted to analyze the problem domain in the industrial expert’s viewpoint. In addition, web based questionnaires, semi structured interviews and observations were used to gather data from other stakeholders of the system. Key findings of this research was that Sri Lanka has established plans to improve the infrastructure of the country to attract and accommodate more MICE tourists. However, the image of Sri Lanka is not well developed and the service quality of the hospitality and transport industry plays a major role in a MICE tourist perception of the country. Based on the findings it was considered to develop functional online collaboration platform as a website linking organizations, hospitality and transport industry of Sri Lanka for attraction of MICE tourists. The web based prototype was developed using a Content Management System: Word Press, PHP integrated with MySQL.