Sri Lanka has entered a consequential new phase in the formulation of its tourism policy with the commencement of the National Tourism Strategic Planning Consultancy for 2026–2031, an initiative supported by the World Bank’s Grant Facility for Project Preparation and intended to provide the country with a comprehensive strategic framework for the development of a globally competitive, sustainable and resilient tourism sector. The consultancy, entrusted to the joint venture of Aninver Development Partners of Spain and EML Consultants PLC of Sri Lanka, is expected to examine tourism demand and supply, investment requirements, regulatory and institutional structures, international marketing and the means by which the resulting strategy may be translated into a national implementation roadmap.
At the same time, a parallel Global Destination Communication Campaign Road Map Consultancy, led by Skift Inc. and MTI Consulting, seeks to reposition Sri Lanka in international markets through market intelligence, contemporary destination communication and a coherent five-year promotional strategy. Taken together, these initiatives represent more than an exercise in tourism promotion; they signify an attempt to place tourism upon a more sophisticated foundation of governance, investment, market diversification, institutional capacity and sustainability, while aligning provincial aspirations with national policy objectives. The significance of this undertaking, however, extends beyond tourism itself, for an island destination cannot realise the economic potential of its tourism resources without an equally coherent architecture of international air connectivity. The new five-year tourism strategy must therefore be conceived in intimate conjunction with Sri Lanka’s national aviation policy, for the tourist destination begins, in an economic sense, not when the visitor reaches the hotel or the beach, but when the aircraft establishes the bridge between Sri Lanka and the international market.
Tourism and Air Transport: Two Sides of the Same Strategic Equation
Sri Lanka stands today at a significant juncture in the evolution of its tourism industry. The country possesses the attributes of an enviable destination: a compact geography in which beaches, mountains, forests, wildlife, archaeology, religious heritage, cuisine and human hospitality coexist within relatively short distances. Yet the possession of these attributes does not, in itself, constitute a tourism economy. A destination acquires economic significance only when accessibility, connectivity, infrastructure, investment, regulation, human resources, marketing and sustainability converge within a coherent policy architecture. It is against this background that the commencement of the National Tourism Strategic Planning Consultancy for 2026–2031 assumes considerable importance. Supported by the World Bank’s Grant Facility for Project Preparation, the consultancy is intended to produce a strategic framework embracing demand and supply analysis, investment requirements, regulatory and institutional reform, marketing and an implementation roadmap. A parallel Global Destination Communication Campaign Road Map is intended to modernize Sri Lanka’s international tourism message and strengthen its global visibility.
The significance of these initiatives lies not merely in their subject matter but in the opportunity they present to correct a structural weakness that has historically affected tourism planning in Sri Lanka: the tendency to regard tourism as an industry standing on its own rather than as a complex ecosystem dependent upon transportation, aviation, infrastructure, agriculture, culture, environmental resources, telecommunications, finance and international commerce. Of these dependencies, none is more fundamental to international tourism than aviation. The proposition is deceptively simple. Tourism is a destination activity, but international tourism begins as an accessibility activity. The visitor must first reach the destination. For an island nation situated in the Indian Ocean, that proposition acquires almost axiomatic force. Sri Lanka’s tourism strategy therefore cannot be fully rational unless it is meshed with its aviation policy, airport development, air services policy, airline connectivity, air navigation infrastructure and the wider economic architecture of civil aviation.
The relationship is more profound than the conventional assumption that aviation merely transports tourists to a destination. Air transport and tourism have become mutually dependent components of a single economic system. The material upon which this essay is based correctly observes that air transport and tourism are “inextricably linked” and that the emergence of mass international tourism since the 1960s was closely associated with the technological development of jet aircraft and the liberalisation of air transport markets. It notes that, before the pandemic, air transport accounted for a substantial proportion of international tourist movements and that aviation generated employment and economic activity extending far beyond airlines and airports themselves. The significance of this relationship is that the tourism industry cannot be understood merely by examining hotels, restaurants, attractions and tour operators. The air transport system is itself part of the tourism value chain.
Sri Lanka’s historical tourism performance reinforces this proposition. Tourism receipts reached approximately four billion United States dollars in 2018, when international arrivals exceeded two million and the industry generated approximately three million direct and indirect employment opportunities. Tourism’s direct contribution to employment also increased substantially over the preceding two decades. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by the economic crisis of 2022, exposed the vulnerability of an economy dependent upon international tourism. Arrivals fell dramatically and the sector suffered from declining demand, labour shortages, reputational damage and the outward migration of skilled workers. The lesson is not that Sri Lanka should retreat from tourism, but that tourism must henceforth be constructed upon a more resilient and diversified foundation.
The emerging philosophy of the new tourism strategy appears therefore to be a movement from volume towards value. This is a particularly important distinction. A tourism policy which measures success principally by the number of persons crossing the immigration counter risks confusing physical movement with economic development. A destination may receive millions of visitors while generating comparatively modest expenditure per visitor, short lengths of stay and limited local economic retention. Conversely, a destination receiving fewer visitors who remain longer, spend more extensively and engage with local communities may generate substantially greater economic value while imposing less pressure upon infrastructure and natural resources.
Sri Lanka should therefore aspire not simply to attract more tourists but to attract the right tourists, from appropriate markets, for longer periods and with greater participation in the domestic economy. Wellness tourism, cultural and heritage tourism, wildlife tourism, ecological tourism, adventure tourism, marine tourism, pilgrimage, gastronomy, MICE tourism and experiential tourism all provide opportunities to develop a higher-value tourism proposition. Yet high-value tourism requires high-quality accessibility. The affluent traveller, the conference delegate, the wellness tourist and the specialist wildlife traveller do not purchase an attraction alone. They purchase time, convenience, reliability and experience. A destination reached through inconvenient connections, excessive transfer times or unreliable schedules is economically more distant than its geographical coordinates suggest.
This is where aviation policy becomes tourism policy.
The National Aviation Policy as an Instrument of Tourism Development
Sri Lanka’s National Civil Aviation Policy already provides a foundation upon which such integration can be constructed. It identifies aviation as a national instrument for economic development and envisages Sri Lanka developing its aviation potential as a transport and connectivity hub in South Asia. It recognizes the importance of efficient airports, airspace capacity and airline connectivity and identifies international air services as contributing to tourism, trade, investment and employment. It also contemplates the development of new international markets, new city pairs, the strengthening of Bandaranaike International Airport and the development of other airports according to market requirements.
The policy significance of this is considerable. Aviation policy is not merely concerned with aircraft, airports and air traffic management. Properly conceived, it is economic policy expressed through aviation. An international air service creates a physical bridge between a foreign market and a domestic destination. That bridge carries not merely passengers but foreign exchange, investment opportunities, business relationships, employment and the possibility of wider regional development.
The difficulty, however, lies in implementation. Tourism authorities may identify particular countries as priority markets while aviation authorities negotiate traffic rights without sufficiently integrating those negotiations with destination-development objectives. Airlines may open routes because of their own network economics while tourism authorities promote destinations without adequate knowledge of available seat capacity. An airline may perceive insufficient demand to sustain a route while the tourism authority believes that the route itself is necessary to create the demand. The result is a policy asymmetry in which tourism and aviation may each pursue rational objectives but collectively produce an irrational outcome.
What is required is therefore not merely coordination but strategic meshing.
Tourism planning should identify the markets and visitor segments that Sri Lanka wishes to cultivate, while aviation planning should determine the connectivity required to reach those markets. The tourism strategy should consequently become an input into air services negotiations, airport development, airline incentives, route development and air navigation planning. Conversely, aviation authorities should inform tourism planners of the practical constraints within which tourism demand can be converted into actual passenger movements.
The relationship is circular. Tourism generates aviation demand, while aviation creates tourism accessibility. Improved accessibility reduces the monetary and temporal costs of reaching a destination and may consequently stimulate further tourism. Increased tourism flows may then encourage airlines, airports and investors to expand connectivity and infrastructure. The source material correctly identifies this as a potentially self-reinforcing mechanism, while warning that the same mechanism can cause a destination to become a victim of its own success when growth exceeds carrying capacity.
That warning is particularly relevant to Sri Lanka.
The ICAO Aviation Satellite Account and the Economics of Connectivity
The most intellectually useful bridge between tourism policy and aviation policy is provided by the work of the International Civil Aviation Organization on the Aviation Satellite Account. The importance of the ICAO initiative is epistemological before it is statistical. Governments have traditionally experienced difficulty in measuring aviation’s economic contribution because its effects are distributed throughout the economy. The economic value of an airport is not confined to landing fees. The economic value of an airline is not limited to its own turnover. Air navigation services, ground handling, catering, maintenance, hotels, restaurants, transport services, retail and tourism attractions are all interconnected within the aviation ecosystem.
Much of this value disappears into separate statistical categories.
The Aviation Satellite Account provides a means of making that value visible. Developed in accordance with the United Nations System of National Accounts, the ICAO framework uses supply-and-use and input-output approaches to measure the economic contribution of aviation and to identify its effects on GDP, employment, taxation, consumption and the balance of payments. It also demonstrates the interrelationship between aviation and other sectors, including tourism.
For Sri Lanka, this approach offers a particularly powerful policy instrument. The relevant question should no longer be confined to how much revenue an airport generates or how many passengers pass through its terminals. The question should be: what is aviation worth to the Sri Lankan economy as a whole?
Consider the journey of an international visitor. The traveller purchases an air ticket and arrives at Bandaranaike International Airport. The traveller then purchases accommodation, food, transport, excursions, telecommunications, cultural experiences and retail products. Hotels employ workers and purchase domestic supplies. Transport operators purchase fuel and maintenance services. Tourism enterprises pay taxes and wages. Workers spend their incomes elsewhere in the economy. The original aviation movement consequently produces a chain of economic effects that extends far beyond the aircraft itself.
This is precisely why aviation statistics based only upon passenger numbers provide an incomplete picture. Passenger movements tell us how many people travelled. They do not tell us how much economic value their movements generated.
The ICAO Satellite Account approach allows Sri Lanka to construct a more sophisticated conception of aviation as a productive economic sector. It could, for example, identify the contribution of international air connectivity to tourism expenditure, employment, foreign exchange earnings, tax revenues and regional development. It could also assist government in assessing the economic return of particular routes, airports and infrastructure investments.
Such a framework could change the manner in which aviation investment decisions are made.
A new route should not be evaluated merely by asking whether an airline can fill its aircraft. It should also be assessed according to the tourism expenditure it generates, the employment it supports, the foreign exchange it brings into the country and the extent to which it contributes to national and regional development.
This would transform aviation connectivity from a technical transport variable into an instrument of economic policy.
Connectivity, Airports and Destination Development
Connectivity itself must also be understood more intelligently. It is not synonymous with the number of flights or passengers. Frequency, directness, schedule quality, reliability, affordability, network breadth and intermodal connectivity all determine the practical accessibility of a destination. A destination may technically possess an international airport while remaining poorly connected to the markets it seeks to cultivate.
Sri Lanka’s tourism strategy should therefore identify priority tourism markets and translate those priorities into a connectivity programme. If a particular market is identified as strategically important, the relevant questions should immediately follow. Which foreign airports serve that market? Is adequate seat capacity available? Are traffic rights sufficient? Are there airline partners capable of operating the route? Are airport slots available? Are the flight timings compatible with tourism demand? What ground infrastructure is required once the visitor arrives?
The same principle applies domestically.
The airport should not be regarded simply as a terminal where the journey ends. It should be regarded as a gateway into a tourism ecosystem. Bandaranaike International Airport cannot sensibly be planned independently of Colombo’s accommodation capacity, surface transportation, road congestion, railway connectivity and regional tourism attractions. Similarly, the development of regional airports cannot be justified merely by the existence of runways. An airport creates tourism value only when it connects to a destination capable of receiving, accommodating and satisfying visitors.
Sri Lanka should consequently think in terms of airport–destination corridors. International gateways should connect to regional aviation facilities and efficient surface transport, which should in turn connect with tourism clusters and local communities. The airport would then become not an isolated piece of infrastructure but the first physical component of the visitor experience.
This has particular significance for the Government’s objective of distributing tourism benefits throughout the provinces. The development of tourism beyond traditional concentrations requires accessibility to areas which may possess substantial natural or cultural resources but remain economically peripheral. Aviation can contribute to that objective, but it must not be assumed that every tourism region requires a new airport. In some cases, improved roads and railways may provide the more economically rational solution. In other cases, domestic aviation or regional airport development may be justified. The decision must be based upon evidence rather than infrastructure enthusiasm.
The current Sri Lanka Air Navigation Plan recognises airports as important components of national economic infrastructure supporting tourism, investment and trade and also identifies the continuing development of domestic airports and air navigation infrastructure as significant to national connectivity.
The underlying principle should therefore be one of integrated accessibility rather than airport proliferation.
Sustainability and the Question of Carrying Capacity
No contemporary tourism strategy can avoid the environmental consequences of aviation. The earlier material appropriately identifies the tension between increased accessibility, overtourism and aviation’s contribution to climate change, while referring to international mechanisms such as CORSIA.
The appropriate policy response, however, is not to regard aviation as inherently incompatible with sustainable tourism. The question is what form of aviation growth Sri Lanka should encourage.
There is an important distinction between mass tourism and high-value tourism. If Sri Lanka can increase expenditure per visitor and length of stay without proportionately increasing visitor numbers, it may achieve greater economic value while placing less pressure upon its physical and ecological resources. A visitor who flies thousands of kilometres to Sri Lanka for two nights presents a different sustainability equation from one who remains for two or three weeks and travels through several provinces.
The objective should therefore be to maximize the economic value generated per international movement, rather than simply to maximize the number of movements.
This proposition gives environmental policy and aviation policy a common vocabulary. CORSIA and other international aviation climate measures are necessary, but destination sustainability must also be considered. Airport expansion, route development, tourism carrying capacity, water consumption, waste management, biodiversity and community welfare should be considered as interconnected variables.
The concept of sustainable tourism therefore cannot be confined to environmentally friendly hotels or conservation programmes. It must extend to the entire transportation chain through which the tourist reaches the destination.
Resilience and the Lessons of Crisis
The experience of COVID-19 demonstrated with unusual clarity the fragility of the tourism–aviation relationship. When international aviation collapsed, tourism collapsed with it. The source material records the extraordinary decline in international tourism and the simultaneous contraction of aviation demand during the pandemic.
Sri Lanka must therefore build resilience into the tourism–aviation architecture.
Resilience requires diversification of source markets and airline partners, protection of critical airport infrastructure, digital facilitation, flexible air services arrangements, emergency connectivity and coordinated crisis communication. A tourism industry dependent excessively upon one geographical market, one airline or one form of tourism is inherently vulnerable.
The same applies to aviation. Airports, airlines and air navigation services must be capable of absorbing disruptions and recovering rapidly. Tourism authorities and aviation authorities should therefore have a common crisis-management framework rather than independent emergency plans.
The relationship between tourism and aviation is particularly sensitive to economic, political and social shocks because both sectors are strongly cyclical and because causality runs in both directions. The appropriate response is consequently not merely recovery planning but anticipatory resilience.
Towards an Integrated Sri Lankan Tourism–Aviation Strategy
The institutional question is perhaps the most important of all. The fragmentation of tourism planning, management and policymaking has historically represented a systemic weakness. A genuinely integrated strategy would require the principal aviation and tourism institutions to work within a common policy framework rather than simply consulting one another when individual projects arise.
Sri Lanka would benefit from a permanent institutional mechanism bringing together tourism authorities, the Civil Aviation Authority, airport and air navigation authorities, airlines, immigration, customs, surface transport authorities, provincial administrations, environmental agencies and representatives of the tourism industry. Its function should be substantive rather than ceremonial. It should periodically examine tourism forecasts alongside airline capacity, airport capacity, route development, tourism expenditure, employment, environmental pressures, regional distribution and investment requirements.
At the centre of this architecture should be an integrated tourism–aviation data system.
Sri Lanka should seriously consider developing an Aviation Satellite Account alongside its Tourism Satellite Account. The purpose would not merely be to create another statistical publication. It would be to create an empirical basis for government decision-making.
The country should be able to determine the economic contribution of individual aviation markets and, where possible, individual routes. It should be possible to ask what economic activity is generated by a direct connection between Colombo and a particular international city, how many tourism jobs that connection supports, what foreign exchange it generates, how much visitors spend, how long they remain, which regions receive their expenditure and what infrastructure is required to accommodate them.
Such questions would give substance to the principle of evidence-based tourism policy.
The ICAO Aviation Satellite Account provides the methodological vocabulary for such an undertaking. The source material itself notes ICAO’s recognition of the importance of a satellite account for properly measuring the economic size and impact of aviation.
The ultimate objective should be to make the tourism strategy and the aviation policy mutually constitutive. Tourism policy should identify where economic demand exists or can be created. Aviation policy should provide the means through which that demand can be converted into physical accessibility. Airport policy should provide the infrastructure through which accessibility becomes a visitor experience. Surface transport policy should distribute the visitor across destinations. Environmental policy should establish the boundaries within which the system may grow. Economic policy should measure the value generated by the entire chain.
In such an architecture, tourism ceases to be an isolated sector and becomes part of a national economic system.
My Take
The commencement of Sri Lanka’s National Tourism Strategic Planning process for 2026–2031 provides an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between tourism and aviation. The challenge is not simply to develop another tourism plan but to construct an integrated national strategy in which tourism, aviation, transport, investment, environment and regional development reinforce one another.
The central proposition is therefore that Sri Lanka cannot have an effective tourism strategy without an aviation strategy that is deliberately designed to support it. Nor can aviation policy achieve its full economic potential if it is formulated independently of tourism demand, destination development and visitor expenditure.
The National Civil Aviation Policy already recognizes aviation as an instrument of tourism, trade, investment, employment and national connectivity. The ICAO Aviation Satellite Account provides the analytical means by which those relationships can be measured. The new tourism strategy provides the opportunity to bring them together.
The deeper transformation required is conceptual. Sri Lanka must cease regarding aviation merely as the means by which tourists arrive. The aircraft is more than a vehicle; the airport is more than infrastructure; and air connectivity is more than a passenger statistic. Together they constitute an economic architecture through which Sri Lanka accesses the global tourism economy.
The strategic question is therefore no longer simply how Sri Lanka can attract more tourists. It is how Sri Lanka can design an integrated aviation–tourism system through which the appropriate visitors, from appropriate markets, can reach appropriate destinations, remain for sufficient periods, generate meaningful economic value, distribute that value across communities and provinces, and do so without destroying the environmental and cultural assets upon which tourism itself depends.
That is the true test of the five-year tourism strategy.
It is also the point at which tourism policy becomes national economic policy.
And it is here that the ICAO Aviation Satellite Account acquires significance beyond statistics: it provides the means by which Sri Lanka can make visible the otherwise hidden economic relationship between the aircraft that brings the visitor, the airport that receives the visitor, the destination that accommodates the visitor and the economy that ultimately benefits from the visitor.
The future of Sri Lankan tourism should be planned not just from the destination’s perspective, but from the perspective of the entire system that makes the destination accessible. Only by aligning tourism with other sectors can it become a sustainable, resilient, high-value pillar of Sri Lanka’s national development.
