Starter Kit. Idea 482 of 500. Cluster 26
Negombo: the fish market and the canals as Sri Lanka's Venice, done before the residents leave
The mechanism, from the book
Every city has one thing it could be known for, and each is currently known for nothing in particular.
The first step
Get up before dawn and go to the fish market, then find one boatman on the canals willing to take visitors out. Offer a 3-hour morning tour, market then canal, to the front desks of 5 beach hotels in the town at a fixed price, with a commission for the hotel. Bookings in the first fortnight tell you whether visitors will pay for the town beyond the beach.
- Who pays first
- A beach-hotel guest with one spare morning, who wants to see a working fish market and the canals with someone who knows them.
- What leaves today
- Visitors sleep in Negombo on their first or last night and leave without spending on the town's own market or its waterways.
Ask first
- Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority. Ask whether a market and canal tour can be registered as a tourist service.
- Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources. Ask whether a fishing boat may take visitors on the canals.
Check before you spend
Confirm that the boat may carry paying passengers, life jackets for everyone, insurance for visitors, and the fish market's permission to bring visitors in.
Find out these three numbers
- What would a hotel guest pay for a morning tour?
- How many guests would each hotel send in a week?
- What does the boatman need for each morning?
A comparison from the book
Venice. Chapter Five
"Venice has around 47,000 people living in its historic centre. In 1951 it had 175,000."
Build the tour so the boatmen and the market earn from it, and the residents stay.
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.