Sri Lanka does not have many easy economic wins left. It cannot manufacture scale overnight, cannot rebuild export complexity by slogan, cannot borrow its way back into comfort, and cannot depend forever on remittances sent by citizens who left because the economy at home failed to offer them enough. Tourism, in that context, is one of the few available levers that can still move quickly, earn foreign exchange, create employment, revive small businesses, and spread income across the country without waiting a decade for industrial policy to mature.
Which makes the country’s performance not merely disappointing, but difficult to excuse.
Sri Lanka welcomed a record number of tourists in 2025, surpassing the pre-crisis peak reached in 2018. The headline number looked respectable. The earnings did not. The country keeps counting heads at the airport as though arrivals alone pay the bills, when the real test is what each visitor spends, how long they stay, where that money goes, and whether the national tourism product is strong enough to command higher value rather than merely higher volume. It is not.
A country serious about tourism does not treat its main international airport as an afterthought for decades. The Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) is the first physical impression many visitors receive of Sri Lanka, and too often it looks like a warning rather than a welcome. It is congested, tired, visually dated, and badly out of step with the image the country attempts to sell abroad. The second terminal has become a national symbol of the Sri Lankan method of development: announced, delayed, restarted, delayed again, reviewed, retendered, and explained endlessly while passengers queue under the same inadequate facilities.
The failure is not limited to the BIA. Too many major tourist locations still operate below the standard required of a country that claims tourism is central to its recovery. Public toilets, transport links, signage, waste management, visitor information, safety systems, parking, digital ticketing, regulated guides, and basic site maintenance remain uneven across destinations that should, by now, be generating far higher revenue. Sri Lanka has world-class natural and cultural assets but too often surrounds them with second-rate public infrastructure.
The private sector has carried more of this industry than it is credited for. Hotels, small guesthouses, tour operators, restaurants, drivers, experience providers, and informal service businesses rebuilt confidence after a pandemic, an economic collapse, shortages, protests, fuel queues, and currency instability. They marketed, discounted, repaired, rehired, and survived. What they need now is not another slogan, another logo, or another committee. They need functioning public infrastructure, predictable regulation, destination management, cleaner towns, faster approvals, better training, and a State that understands tourism as an export industry rather than a photo opportunity.
Promotion matters, but promotion cannot compensate indefinitely for weak delivery. A destination can advertise beaches, wildlife, tea country, heritage cities, wellness retreats, and smiling hospitality as much as it likes. If the airport is outdated, roads are difficult, public facilities are poor, service standards are inconsistent, and high-spending tourists do not find enough premium, well-managed experiences, the country will continue to attract visitors without extracting the value it should.
A tourism strategy worthy of the crisis the country has lived through would begin with blunt priorities: finish Terminal II, modernise Terminal I, clean and upgrade key tourist towns, support private operators with credit and tax predictability, improve training in hospitality and languages, regulate low-quality operators without crushing small businesses, develop night-time economies in selected destinations, improve domestic air and rail connectivity, and create destination-level plans that are actually implemented. None of this is imaginative. That is precisely the point. The basics are still unfinished.
The Government should stop treating tourism earnings as something that will rise automatically because tourists like beaches and elephants. Other countries have beaches. Other countries have wildlife. Other countries have culture, food, nightlife, airports that work, and states that understand that the tourist’s spending decision is shaped by convenience as much as beauty.
If tourism is the low-hanging fruit, Sri Lanka has spent years standing under the tree, discussing the fruit, photographing the fruit, appointing committees on the fruit, and wondering why the basket is still not full. The rest of the region is not waiting. Tourists have choices. Dollars have choices too.