Starter Kit. Idea 468 of 500. Cluster 25
Club-cricket tours: amateur teams from abroad playing Sri Lankan clubs on the domestic grounds
The mechanism, from the book
The country's best-known export is cricket, and little of the business around it is built at home.
The first step
Ask 3 Sri Lankan clubs with their own grounds whether they would host a touring amateur team for a match, and agree a fee for the ground, the umpires and the tea. Write a 7-night tour with 3 matches, rooms near the grounds and a day at the beach, priced per player. Send it to the secretaries of 5 amateur clubs abroad. A club that asks for dates is the proof.
- Who pays first
- An amateur cricket club abroad that tours every few years and wants real matches against local sides, with the grounds and rooms arranged for it.
- What leaves today
- Amateur teams abroad tour elsewhere, and the club grounds here earn nothing from the visitors who would love to play on them.
Ask first
- Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority. Ask how a registered tour operator can sell packages built around club matches.
- Department of the Registrar of Companies. Ask how to register a tour business that sells packages abroad.
Check before you spend
Written agreement from each host club on dates, ground and fees, the tour operator registration, and insurance for players and travellers.
Find out these three numbers
- What would an amateur team abroad pay for a week's tour?
- How many local clubs would host a visiting team?
- What does a club charge for its ground and a match?
A comparison from the book
The Matterhorn. Chapter Five
"something no marketing budget can buy: a story that people already knew"
Cricket is the island's best-known story; let visiting amateurs play inside it on real club grounds.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.