Borders and Budget: Visa reform will boost tourism and reverse brain drain.

Three million tourists are set to visit our shores next year. We will issue nearly as many online visas - millions too many. ETAs are a tourist's bane: rather than dreamy sun, sea and sand, the weary salaryman's getaway begins with the tedium of forms.

The tourist's ayubowan to Sri Lanka begins with ferreting for flight details and credit cards. Warm-up complete, the ordeal begins in earnest: 20 clicks to navigate through the ETA form and countless key strokes to fill out the 27 form fields. Each question brings forth its own miseries, and sometimes mind-reading feats: 'They're asking me for my address in Sri Lanka. Hmm, does this mean my first address, my last address...but I haven't even booked

my hotel..dear, dear maybe I should book the Maldives instead. They've got a visa-on- arrival.'

Followed, naturally, by web-pages reloading with unsaved data and vindictive payment gateways rejecting credit cards for arcane and esoteric reasons. Rather than a Small Miracle, they experience So Sri Lanka.

This charade costs us millions of dollars every year. We are losing tens of thousands of tourists to our competitors.

Based on the three scenarios below, switching from ETA to visa-on-arrival a la the Maldives or Singapore should generate between $24 million to $145 million in additional tourism revenue. The precise number is not especially relevant. The point is that these roughly right numbers are substantial enough to generate a robust prima facie case for experimenting with opening up visa-on-arrival and optimising the ETA experience.

Sri Lanka already operates visa-on-arrival for Singapore, Maldives and Seychelles citizens. In light of the tens of millions of dollars we're losing in the absence of visas-on-arrival, very compelling reasons must be provided for not opening-up visa-on-arrival for citizens of out main tourism markets (such as the EU, China, Russia and UK). Plus those who have passed

extensive checks in the process of traveling to other countries.

For example, travelers holding multiple entry visas to the US can visit about 51 countries visa free. The burden of proof is therefore on those who say we ought not have a visa-on-arrival regime. All the more so because it appears that, even though not advertised, in a pinch, obtaining a visa-on-arrival is possible at BIA.

Also note that airlines share passenger records with governments 24 hours before arrival. It takes seconds for our border agencies to check the relevant blacklists as...