Like Sri Lanka, SriLankan Airlines is all about outdoors & nature

Like every year since 2017, this year, too, SriLankan Airlines continued as a Title Sponsor of the Nike Melbourne Marathon Festival, one of the largest sporting events in Australia, that saw the participation of over 45,000 people recently. In an interview with India Outbound, Saminda Perera, Head of Marketing, SriLankan Airlines, says that supporting endurance events like the marathon, gives greater visibility to the airline, not just among Australians but also the sizeable Sri Lankan and Indian diaspora.

- Saminda Perera

Q What does sponsoring Melbourne Marathon bring to SriLankan Airlines?

The fundamental idea has been to position SriLankan Airlines with the Australian audience that essentially loves the outdoors. They put a lot of emphasis on their well-being. So, this is one of the best ways to position ourselves in this market. SriLankan Airlines has taken a conscious decision to support only endurance events like marathon, cycling, and surfing to position Sri Lanka as a destination with great outdoors and nature. In Sri Lanka, we use the natural landscape as our backdrop. We don’t need to build stadiums to hold our sporting events and hence we don’t add to any more than necessary carbon emissions as we are conscious of our carbon footprint. So, we support endurance events.

In 2017, as we were ready to launch our operations between Colombo and Melbourne, we wanted to see how quickly we could penetrate the Australian market. So then we zeroed into the Melbourne Marathon Festival as it is an international marathon with a rich history of over four decades and it comes close to the Colombo Marathon.