Idea 10 of 500. Cluster 1: Stay longer (the $2.4 billion gap)
Private pool and garden maintenance businesses serving the above
The mechanism, from the book
If Sri Lanka earned what the Maldives earns per visitor, the visitors it already has would bring in $2.4 billion a year more.
Every idea in cluster 1 uses this mechanism.
A first step
Clean one villa pool and tidy its garden free of charge this week, in return for photographs before and after and the owner's honest verdict. Take those photographs to the villa managers and guesthouse owners on the same stretch of coast and quote a fixed monthly visit. Three monthly contracts cover your equipment and tell you the round works.
- Who pays first
- Villa managers and guesthouse owners who need a reliable weekly service and cannot justify a full-time pool and garden person.
- What leaves today
- A green pool or a dead garden costs a villa its bookings; reliable upkeep protects the nights that bring foreign spending in.
The idea and the mechanism are from the book. The first step was written for this site as a suggestion; if you know a better one, say so.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
The only test any idea on this site has to pass. The four rules that go with it are here.
In the book
- Ch. FiveThe Most Photographed Rock in the World
The stay shortened by nearly a quarter, and the $2.4 billion gap
More from cluster 1
- 1Boutique eco-lodges with heritage views
- 2Luxury treehouse stays in forest margins
- 3Glamping with proper service, at sites with none
- 4Heritage homestays in family houses
- 5Floating cabanas on the ancient reservoirs
- 6Forest holiday villages on the Center Parcs model: lodges among the trees, a covered pool, bikes and a lake, so a family stays a week, not a night
Idea 10 of the 500 in the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? Every one can be started by one person, one family or one small firm.