- Shenelle Rodrigo joins Lonely Planet
For over a decade, Sri Lanka’s travel narrative has shifted towards more grounded, local storytelling, with creators like Shenelle Rodrigo and her husband Shehaan Thahir (Sheneller) at the forefront. Now, in a landmark moment, she has been appointed Sri Lanka’s first Destination Correspondent for Lonely Planet, marking not just personal recognition, but a wider shift towards local voices shaping global travel narratives.
From documenting crises to influencing international perception, Sheneller’s work has gone beyond storytelling, becoming a trusted, real-time lens into the country. Reaching millions globally, her content has played a tangible role in sustaining tourism confidence during uncertain times.
The Sunday Morning Brunch sat down with Shenelle Rodrigo to extend our congratulations on this new chapter as Sri Lanka’s first Destination Correspondent for Lonely Planet and to gain insight into the journey so far.
Following are excerpts:
How does this appointment with Lonely Planet change your role? Or does it simply validate what you have been doing?
It is definitely a mix of both. The very reason we were handpicked by Lonely Planet was that they felt we echoed the same values they stand for as an organisation influencing millions of travellers around the world.
While the recognition is certainly a highlight of our career, and something we always dreamt of achieving, the journey to get here has opened our eyes to the importance of guiding tourism in the right direction. Having built a community of over 500,000 followers across our platforms, we recognise the influence that comes with that reach.
We want to ensure that we do our best to build a model that is both sustainable for the environment and beneficial for the communities of this island. In that sense, we do feel a deep sense of responsibility in how we use our platforms to promote Sri Lanka to the world.
Looking back, what were the key ‘right turns’ that shaped your journey?
Staying authentic to the values and experiences we believed in was definitely one of the key right turns in our journey. Over the past four years, since building the platform to a point of real visibility, we’ve intentionally rejected 98% of the projects that have come our way, simply because they didn’t align with our interests or our vision for how we wanted to grow.
Looking back, it seems like an easy decision to make. But at the time, when we were struggling to keep the lights on and trying to expand our capacity to create better work as a team, saying no to what seemed like easy money was tough, especially in the world of social media, where it’s just a 60-second ad.
Learning to say no and to evaluate every campaign based on its fit with our audience was the right choice. We know it’s the reason we stand out today, and why we’re known as creators who are genuinely committed to our niche and who never take our viewers’ attention or trust for granted.
There were also some significant business opportunities we turned down purely to stay focused on being best positioned to share the stories of Sri Lanka with the world. If our journey shows anything, it’s that staying true to your story and your country can take you further than any shortcut. And this moment definitely feels like the universe acknowledging and rewarding us for those sacrifices.
How did you position yourselves as a trusted source during moments of crisis, and did that come with pressure?
It’s a result of us seeing the impact our work has been able to create in moments of crisis. In the past, with the Easter Sunday attacks and the Covid-19 lockdowns, it was simply us finding a way to keep working and creating stories that felt relevant, stories that could inspire change and action when the mood across the country was relatively dull. But the response we received from that work really did shape how we approached content creation very early on, pushing us to be impact-driven as opposed to chasing viral trends.
Most recently, as we saw the first news of Cyclone Ditwah emerge, we immediately knew we had to do something because our platform was best positioned to do so. We had the expertise, the network, and the independence to create a campaign that would inform travellers of the real situation on the ground.
Through Sheneller Ventures, our tour operations arm, we were also able to verify conditions firsthand and provide updates that were grounded in reality rather than speculation. That campaign reached three million viewers in the first week and helped redirect traveller confidence during a critical window for the industry.
More often than not, these campaigns have come at the cost of us footing the bill ourselves. We aren’t always able to find partners to support us on initiatives that are this time-sensitive and that require authenticity above everything else. That has definitely put pressure on the business side of our operations. But as we expand and diversify our revenue streams through Sheneller Ventures and the consultancy arm, we’re increasingly able to fund these projects ourselves rather than wait on sponsors.
How do you balance honesty with optimism when your storytelling impacts tourism and livelihoods?
We have always maintained that our platforms will focus on the positives rather than the negatives. Where it is possible for us to highlight a challenge and offer a solution, particularly where we know we can effect real change, we do our utmost to do so within our capacity.
We do receive some criticism for sometimes being overly optimistic in our storytelling, but that is a personal philosophy of mine. I would be doing an injustice to myself if I were to focus on the negatives rather than the positives.
We believe that responsible optimism, showing what Sri Lanka is capable of rather than dwelling on what has gone wrong, is what moves the needle for the communities and businesses that depend on tourism. And ultimately, that approach has got us this far.
Is this a turning point for Sri Lankan creators, or do structural barriers still remain?
There is certainly a shift towards local voices shaping global narratives, but as a country we still have massive structural barriers to overcome. There are very few ecosystems in place to encourage and foster authentic local content creation.
Creators in Sri Lanka often lack access to funding, mentorship, and the professional frameworks that their counterparts in other markets take for granted. This is something we are deeply passionate about changing, drawing on our own lived experiences, and it is one of the driving forces behind the platforms and initiatives we are building through our broader operations.
What fears or pressures came with this opportunity?
There weren’t many fears that came with this role, as they simply wanted us to do what we were already doing. There is definitely a greater sense of responsibility that comes with being a representative for your country, but these are guidelines and guardrails we have always had in place internally to ensure we would be representing Sri Lanka online to the best of our ability. If anything, it has reinforced our belief that the standards we set for ourselves from the very beginning were the right ones.
How has your partnership evolved, and how are you navigating this individual role within a shared brand?
From day one we have worked on everything together, and nothing has changed today. We have learnt to lean into our strengths and delegate our weaknesses, working together as a couple and now as a larger team. While all of my appointments are on an individual level, to us it is always a credit to both of our work. There is a broader team guided by both of our philosophies behind the brand Sheneller.
Although I may be the one in the spotlight, those who have seen us speak in public often comment on how we lean on each other to complete our sentences and thoughts. It almost feels like we are functioning off one mind with a shared vision, and that dynamic is what makes Sheneller what it is.
How will you maintain your raw, ground-level storytelling within Lonely Planet’s more structured travel narratives?
Interestingly, this was the exact reason Lonely Planet selected us. They too seem to be making the shift towards more raw, local storytelling, and they probably see that trend on a larger scale than we do.
It’s great to work with an established global brand that has amazing frameworks in place to ensure we hit the mark. It has been a wonderful learning curve for us as Sri Lankan creators, and we hope it opens the door for more voices from this part of the world to be heard on the global stage.
What gaps are you aiming to address through Sheneller Ventures and Holivate, and what does success look like five years from now?
Storytelling will always be at the core of all our work. The ecosystems we are building exist to create the change we hope to see within the industries we operate in.
Through Sheneller Ventures, our boutique travel agency, we hope to guide tourists towards more local experiences and create systems that ensure tourism dollars benefit a broader net of stakeholders than they currently do. This also enables us to create more authentic stories as we see fit, which we can now fund internally.
Through the Holivate booking platform, which is currently being soft-launched, we hope to enable more content creators to monetise their hotel conversions more transparently. The result would be a more robust content creation ecosystem that benefits the entire hospitality sector. It’s the kind of infrastructure that Sri Lanka’s creator economy has been missing, and we’re building it because we lived through that gap ourselves.
Five years from now, we hope to be able to share the case study of Sri Lankan tourism as a launchpad to show the world how tourism can be done right – as a sustainable and equitable model that protects the environment and the communities that tourism-reliant destinations depend on, while ensuring travel is more meaningful than superficial.
Finally, this feels like the start of a new era rather than a peak. What do you hope this moment sets in motion for Sri Lanka’s global narrative?
It most definitely is. We are so grateful to everyone who has supported us over the past decade to get to this point. Every hotel, every partner, and every viewer of our work has played a part in what is a pretty significant moment for us.
We are also optimistic that this sets a precedent for travel to be promoted in a meaningful and intentional manner, one that will serve Sri Lanka well in the years to come as we look to capitalise on the tourism boom.
We hope this moment inspires other Sri Lankan creators to believe that authenticity and commitment to your craft can lead to global recognition. The opportunity is there. You just have to be willing to stay the course.