Just after eight on the morning of June 4th, 2025, people lined the Colombo shoreline. Some with simple phones, a few with large cameras, and all to watch a plane trace the coast from Port City to Moratuwa at 1,500 feet before landing at Bandaranaike International Airport. It was a single Airbus A330-200, SriLankan Airlines’ first wide-body delivery in seven years, and the opening move in a plan to grow the national carrier’s 23-aircraft fleet by nearly 60% by 2030.
The aircraft landed at an airline that has spent decades navigating through crises: a civil war, a tsunami, a pandemic that grounded its entire fleet, and a fuel shortage severe enough that pilots once flew empty planes to India just to refuel them. This year, SriLankan won Best Overall Passenger Experience and Most Improved Airline at the PAX International Readership Awards, while an AI-driven pricing system helped lift revenue 13% in the first three quarters of the 2025/26 fiscal year. With a fleet expansion plan, and a fresh set of awards behind it, SriLankan is flying into its next stage of growth.
Growth at SriLankan means more than aircraft. Behind that single plane sits a group of businesses that stretch well beyond flying: a catering arm turning out more than 24,000 meals a day, an engineering team now trusted to service aircraft for Thai carriers too, a cargo operation carrying everything from cut flowers to lithium batteries to live animals, and a ground handling business that grew 17% in the 2024/25 financial year as more airlines returned to Colombo.
What keeps passengers coming back is something beyond what the numbers capture. Every major airline eventually builds its brand identity around one thing passengers remember: a signature service, a design detail, or a face that becomes the brand itself. SriLankan’s answer is quieter: a greeting that defines the warmth of Sri Lankan hospitality. “The moment you walk into the plane, you hear ‘Ayubowan,’ and traditional Sri Lankan music playing, something like Victor Ratnayake, without the lyrics,” says Deepal Perera, the airline’s Manager of Corporate Communications. “Then after you take your seat, we serve Kiribath. Ask any nationality, they love it. We’ve taken our own traditions into the air, and we’ve been serving them ever since.”
From Air Ceylon to SriLankan: A National Carrier, Built Twice
Sri Lanka’s first national airline, Air Ceylon, took to the skies on the morning of December 10th 1947, when Captain Peter Fernando lifted a Douglas DC-3 off the runway at Ratmalana. Its name was Sita Devi, after a queen from the island’s history, and it carried sixteen passengers to Jaffna, then on to Madras. Air Ceylon flew the country’s skies for three decades before it wound down in 1978.
Air Lanka was founded in 1979 on President J.R. Jayawardene’s direction, to grow tourism and connect Sri Lanka to the world. It launched with two leased Boeing 707s. Within a decade, it built a fleet of seven Lockheed TriStars, then the most advanced wide-body aircraft flying, and was crossing into Europe, the Middle East and Australia.
The airline growing around those aircraft grew almost as fast as the aircraft themselves. A year after its first flight, Air Lanka opened its own catering company, which would eventually become SriLankan Catering. By the early 1990s, it had built its own training school for aviation professionals, becoming one of the first international airlines in the world accredited by IATA to run one.
Air Lanka became SriLankan Airlines in 1999, a year after Emirates invested in the airline and took over its management, giving it a new name and a new livery. Inside that decade came a run of firsts: Airbus named it the world’s most efficient operator of the A330 in 2003, Goa became its 50th destination in 2006, and in 2007 it earned an IATA safety certification alongside a European aviation safety rating for its engineering arm. The partnership ended in 2008, the same year SriLankan launched FlySmiLes, its frequent flyer programme. It has since grown to over 950,000 members worldwide, across five tiers, from Blue to Platinum. The years after brought more firsts still: South Asia’s first Green Flight in 2009, and among the first airlines to adopt 2D barcoded boarding passes in 2010.
Today, SriLankan employs about 6,500 people and flies its aircraft to 33 airports in 21 countries. “Globally, there are about 4,000 airports,” says Dimuthu Tennakoon, the airline’s Head of Commercial. “No airline can fly to all of them. The future is the alliance.” In 2014, SriLankan joined oneworld, a global alliance of 15 airlines, the first carrier from the Indian subcontinent to do so. Membership closes the gap between the 33 airports it flies to and the thousands it can reach, opening up 130 destinations across 63 countries. Its frequent flyers are among more than 130 million oneworld cardholders, with access to over 600 lounges at more than 150 airports worldwide.
The airline turns 47 this year, continuing a journey that began with a Douglas DC-3 in 1947. Its fleet today stands at 23 aircraft, all Airbus, 10 wide-body A330s and 13 A320s and A321s, a lineage that traces back to 1994, when Air Lanka became the first airline in Asia to fly the A340. One manufacturer means one training pipeline, one set of spare parts, one language every engineer in the hangar already speaks, a small airline’s version of an advantage the giants have to work harder for. That journey was never carried by one aircraft; behind it sits a group of businesses that grew up around the airline, each with their own story.
More Than an Airline: The Group Behind SriLankan
Each of those businesses has grown alongside the airline rather than in its shadow. Catering, cargo, engineering, ground handling, training, holidays, security: each plays its own part, earning revenue in its own right or supporting the airline in ways that keep it flying, and as demand for travel into Sri Lanka grows, each is finding more of both to do. Flying is only one part of what keeps SriLankan in the air.
SriLankan Catering leads that group by profit. It employs roughly 750 people and turns out more than 24,000 meals a day, every day of the year, serving not just SriLankan but other airlines flying out of Colombo too. Its operation extends well past the kitchen: a 24-room transit hotel, a lounge at the airport, and a laundry processing up to 15,000 pieces a day, all backed by four separate quality certifications for food safety, hygiene and environmental management. In the 2024/25 financial year, its profit grew 17% to Rs4.8 billion, a strong performance for the group’s only subsidiary.
Cargo tells a similar story. In June 2024, SriLankan Cargo reorganised how it carries that share, splitting operations into distinct categories: fast-moving perishables, temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals, high-value goods, and live animals, each handled under its own protocol rather than one generic hold full of boxes. That precision has earned recognition few cargo carriers in the region can claim: the first certification in South Asia for handling lithium batteries, in May 2025, and the first for live animals, in February 2026. It has joined Freightos, the global digital freight marketplace, and stands as a finalist for Airline of the Year at the World Air Cargo Awards.
Engineering earns its keep the same way Catering does: by doing for other airlines what it already does for its own. SriLankan Engineering keeps the airline’s own fleet airworthy, handling the maintenance, repairs and overhauls every aircraft needs between flights. It is certified to European Union Aviation Safety Agency standards, and recently earned certification from Thailand’s own aviation authority, allowing it to do the same work for Thai carriers too. That reputation isn’t new: in 2003, Airbus itself named SriLankan the most efficient operator of the A330 anywhere in the world among small fleets.
SriLankan Aviation College trains the people who keep the rest of this running: from cabin crew and maintenance engineers, to the ground and cargo staff behind them. It holds accreditation from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency and from the civil aviation regulators of Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal and the Maldives, and draws students from beyond Sri Lanka too, including from the Maldives and the Middle East. SriLankan Aviation College is partnered with the European Aviation Maintenance Training Committee, General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University and Royal Aeronautical Society. It started a partnership with Aviation Australia in 2024 to run its first maintenance engineering course abroad.
“We have two simulators, the A320 and the A330-300, where we train our own pilots,” says Deepal. “We also offer that facility to other airlines. It is the only such facility in the country.” In 2011, IATA named it one of the top ten aviation training centres in South Asia; two years later, it joined IATA’s Premier Circle as one of the ten best in the world.
Ground Handling has the most straightforward job in the group: when a plane lands at Colombo, SriLankan is usually the one that meets it, managing check-in counters, baggage and aircraft turnaround on the ground. It is the sole ground handler at Bandaranaike International Airport, a monopoly built by geography rather than by choice. In the 2024/25 financial year, as more foreign airlines returned to Colombo, that business grew 17%. The airport’s recovery and SriLankan’s own revenue from this arm now move together, one line rising with the other. Some of what Ground Handling touches, security has to watch over.
UL AvSec, the Aviation Security Division of SriLankan Airlines, is committed to delivering the highest international aviation security standards through the integration of highly skilled personnel, advanced security technologies, and rigorous quality assurance processes. Accredited with internationally recognised ACC3, RA3, UK Department for Transport (DfT), and U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) certifications, the division enables the secure and seamless movement of direct and EU-bound cargo through Colombo. Across ground operations, the division safeguards aircraft, passengers, baggage, and cargo through comprehensive screening protocols and real-time surveillance systems, ensuring continuous end-to-end visibility, operational integrity, and regulatory compliance.
In-flight, UL AvSec maintains the capability to deploy highly trained Security Flight Observers (SFOs) to manage complex aviation security incidents and high-risk operational scenarios. These specialists, who also undergo advanced training with the Sri Lanka Army Commando Regiment, are regularly deployed to support the secure escort and repatriation of deportees on behalf of border enforcement agencies across Europe and Asia.
The division sustains operational excellence through its dedicated Aviation Security Training Centre, which delivers classroom instruction, practical field exercises, and computer-based simulation training. This integrated training framework ensures personnel remain proficient, compliant with international regulatory requirements, and prepared to respond effectively to the continuously evolving global threat environment. Its operating ethos is driven by professionalism, vigilance, and operational excellence.
Finally, SriLankan Holidays extends the airline’s offering beyond air travel by combining SriLankan Airlines’ own flights with carefully selected hotels, excursions, airport transfers, and destination services, allowing passengers to book a complete travel experience rather than only a seat to their destination. In selected markets, SriLankan Holidays operates through local franchise partners.
In Bangladesh, SriLankan Holidays works with two SriLankan Holidays Franchise Operators (SHFOs), Saimon Holidays and Akashbari Holidays, to offer customised holiday packages and travel solutions to customers. Together, these businesses represent a broader travel ecosystem built around SriLankan Airlines. It seeks to create value at multiple stages of the traveller journey: from planning and booking, to the travel experience itself, and beyond arrival in Sri Lanka.
In the 2024/25 financial year, while flying itself faced real pressure, Catering’s profit and Ground Handling’s revenue both grew 17%. Two different businesses, growing for two different reasons, in the same year.
How Innovation Runs Through the Whole Airline
That journey hasn’t stood still. Over the years, SriLankan Airlines has rebuilt the systems passengers touch and the systems they never see. Some changes are visible the moment someone opens a laptop to book a ticket or walks through the airport. Others run in the background, in flight plans, pricing engines and cargo warehouses, keeping the visible half running smoothly.
What Passengers See
SriLankan still keeps a ticket office open at the World Trade Centre in Fort, as well as in Galle and Kandy. “For a few segments, like religious travellers and seafarers, we still need that counter,” says Dimuthu. “But most passengers want digital now, students, corporates, leisure travellers. They want it quick, they don’t want to waste time.” In 2024, SriLankan rebuilt srilankan.com around an assistant called YAANA, which now answers questions day and night: where to fly, what the baggage rules are, which visa a passenger needs, when the next flight leaves.
It walks a passenger through a booking in ten languages, across sixty localised landing pages worldwide. Alongside YAANA, the airline introduced Google Ads as a dedicated channel to drive traffic to the site, pulling in over 1 million monthly visitors and lifting online sales contribution by 50%. Together, these efforts won SriLankan a Silver Award for Best Sales Growth Strategy at the Asia eCommerce Awards in 2025.
YAANA isn’t the only part of the digital relationship SriLankan has rebuilt. Its loyalty programme, FlySmiLes, was overhauled the same year: members can now buy, transfer or gift miles online, log in through social accounts, and redeem points for far more than flights, including for telecom products, bills payments, devices, and partner merchants offers among them.
The shift from counter to screen continues at the airport. Between 15–20% of departing passengers now use one of 28 self-service check-in kiosks instead of waiting in line. “There’s been a significant improvement using the kiosk machines,” Dimuthu says. Other carriers have noticed too: Singapore Airlines became the first outside airline to use them for its own passengers. Passengers who’ve paid for Sathkara skip the queue altogether; a concierge meets them at the door and walks them through the terminal in person. Feedback units placed at key points track how each of these steps performs, and the results feed a management dashboard in real time.
Once passengers take their seats, the priority shifts from speed to attention, and one idea shapes everything that follows, regardless of what a passenger paid. “Seat pitch is the same across most airlines,” Dimuthu says. “With 250 passengers on board, you can’t give everyone the same attention. But with a smaller cabin, our crew make sure the service stays excellent. That’s how we differentiate: not the hardware, the human touch.”
The food backs that up: SriLankan Flavours, the airline’s Sri Lankan menu options won the prestigious APEX IFSA Best Inflight Food or Beverage 2024 Award while the overall inflight menu was named the best food and beverage programme in Central and South Asia by APEX, the industry body that rates airlines on verified passenger feedback.
That attention shows up in the smaller details too: a menu that changes three times a year, a Sri Lankan dish on every route regardless of destination, a cake for a birthday if a passenger asks, a certificate for an infant’s first flight. “Once, we operated an entirely nut-free flight to accommodate a passenger with a nut allergy,” says Deepal. “Today, we offer passengers with food allergies meal options that cater to their dietary needs.”
None of this happens without people to carry it out, and the airline hired more than 200 new cabin crew last year to keep up. Onboard, Ceylon Coffee has replaced the standard brew, and on select aircraft, wireless connectivity now streams entertainment to a passenger’s device instead of a fixed seatback screen, cutting cabin weight in the process.
Business class carries that philosophy furthest. “We have a different product in each cabin,” Dimuthu says. “What changes isn’t quality, we won’t compromise on that. It’s the level, the presentation, the space.” That space earns its keep: business class makes up a tenth of passengers industry-wide but drives roughly three-quarters of an airline’s profit, and SriLankan’s own business cabin hit a record 76% of capacity in its busiest months.
The airline offers a dedicated limousine transfer to and from the airport on the London route. Smaller changes run across both cabins too: recycled headset bags saved Rs15 million last year, and eco-friendly pillow covers saved another Rs21 million.
What Runs Behind It
Once the aircraft is airborne, the innovation turns to the cost every airline fears most. Fuel is typically an airline’s largest expense, and the most volatile, set by global oil markets rather than anything the airline controls. SriLankan manages it through a set of systems working together. Every flight plan now runs through Lido, a routing system that reads weather and wind to save fuel off a route before takeoff; it pays for itself in three to four years. Airbus Skywise tracks fuel burn tail by tail and flags anything that drifts from normal, while in-house dashboards weigh actual fuel use against what history says a route should need. It extends to the ground too: passenger step floodlights have been converted to energy-efficient LEDs, and a decommissioned water truck was rebuilt in-house into a working fuel bowser rather than replaced.
These systems make a route more efficient. They don’t decide whether a route has a stop. At SriLankan, that was settled years ago. “All our flights are direct,” says Dimuthu. “Corporates prefer that. So do elderly passengers, especially with parents travelling. They don’t want to go through transit in so many places.” That’s been the approach throughout the year, to every destination, since the airline started flying, with one exception in recent years: a combined Colombo-Paris-Frankfurt route during off-peak season.
Maintenance, carried out by SriLankan Engineering, runs on a similar proactive, technology-driven philosophy. It now maintains aircraft for other airlines too, not just its own fleet. When a cabin defect turns up, engineers report it instantly through a mobile app built in-house, replacing paperwork that once slowed down the fix; the report reaches the right team immediately, and a maintenance record generates itself behind it.
Further along the journey, the SriLankan Engineering Calibration Laboratory (SECL), accredited to the international ISO/IEC 17025 standard, continues to ensure the accuracy and reliability of Electrical/Mechanical equipment and test sets used in aircraft maintenance. When the laboratory needed a way to test thermo-hygrometers, its own technical staff transformed a spare cooling chamber into a humidity-controlled chamber using innovative engineering rather than purchasing new equipment. The lab’s motto states the whole approach in three words: Measurements for Betterment.
Managing costs is only half the equation. SriLankan has also rebuilt how it manages revenue. Since October 2024, every fare has run through a new revenue management system built with two major travel-industry technology providers, PROS and Amadeus. The system looks at where a passenger is actually flying to and prices seats individually, city to city, rather than treating every seat on a route the same way. In its first year, it pushed revenue up 13%, well above the 3–5% most airlines see from similar upgrades. It also improved how reliably flights fill up and pushed up what each seat earns across the network by as much as 6%.
New booking intelligence tools now catch revenue that would otherwise go unclaimed. Fleet assignment and rotations are planned to squeeze more from every aircraft, with room built in to adapt when plans change. Group bookings are now streamlined for faster decision-making and operational efficiency. Finance has automated too: robotic process automation now handles work that used to take staff hours by hand.
Beyond the Airline
The businesses built around the airline are innovating in their own right. SriLankan Catering has taken its menu beyond the tarmac, building a retail range of ready-made frozen meals for supermarket shelves at home and abroad. SriLankan Cargo has organised what it carries into distinct categories: perishables that need to move fast, medicine that needs careful handling, high-value goods, and live animals, each with its own protocols.
Behind it, the cargo arm has rebuilt its booking, mail-handling and billing systems, all within the last two years. Some of this discipline has been running quietly since well before any of these systems existed: the airline’s “Planet Friendly SriLankan” programme, in place since 2009, has been pushing small environmental upgrades across the business for over fifteen years.
None of it was built for a single good year. Every system in this section, seen or unseen, has had to work through the airline’s hardest ones too.
“Today, SriLankan employs about 6,500 people and flies its aircraft to 33 airports in 21 countries. In 2014, SriLankan joined oneworld, a global alliance of 15 airlines, the first carrier from the Indian subcontinent to do so. Membership closes the gap between the airports it flies to and the thousands it can reach, opening up 130 destinations across 63 countries.”
Built for Resilience: Crisis After Crisis, Still Flying
“Our strategy has had to change over time,” says Dimuthu. “We’ve had the civil war, the tsunami, the Easter Sunday attacks, COVID, the economic crisis, Cyclone Ditwah last year, and now the conflict in the Middle East. Every few years, there’s another challenge. We’ve faced them all, and the airline is always one of the first to be affected.” It’s a statement that reflects the nature of the aviation industry rather than self-pity. When a country experiences a crisis, its national airline is typically one of the first to absorb the commercial and operational impact.
During the civil war, leisure travel demand into Sri Lanka was not all that great. So SriLankan Airlines repositioned Colombo as a transit hub, carrying passengers between countries rather than relying solely on inbound travel. At various stages of the conflict, transit passengers accounted for almost half of all traffic through Bandaranaike International Airport. Much of that traffic came from next door. “Even today, we consider South India our extended home market,” says Dimuthu. “Within a little more than an hour, we connect Colombo with Trichy, Madurai, Chennai, Cochin, Trivandrum and Bangalore. Those gateways give us access to the wider South Indian catchment, a market of approximately 300 million people, compared with just over 22 million here in Sri Lanka.” Over the years, many Indian travellers have experienced Sri Lankan hospitality firsthand, building a level of familiarity and trust that extends well beyond the flight itself. Today, many families choose Colombo as their preferred connecting point when their elderly parents travel internationally. “We’re a hospitable nation,” says Dimuthu. “That matters when you’re carrying someone’s parents halfway around the world.”
By 2017, that instinct had helped build something remarkable for a country the size of Sri Lanka: a strong and resilient regional network. “We were the first airline to operate 100 flights a week to India back in 2007,” says Dimuthu. “Later, the Middle Eastern carriers entered the market and expanded aggressively. Some eventually operated 185 to 200 weekly flights.” Even as competition intensified, Sri Lanka itself had become an increasingly attractive destination. “By 2017 and 2018, Sri Lanka was welcoming around 2.3 million tourists annually,” he says. “Of those, about 450,000 came from India. At the time, we operated around 125 flights a week to India. China was our second-largest tourism market, served by around 15 weekly flights, while the United Kingdom was third. We were also the only airline offering direct services between Sri Lanka and the UK.” It was a period of sustained growth that reflected both Sri Lanka’s rising appeal as a destination and the airline’s expanding regional connectivity. Yet none of that momentum, or the scale the airline had built, prepared the country for what came next.
On 21 April 2019, the devastating Easter Sunday attacks brought Sri Lanka’s tourism industry to an abrupt standstill. Cancellations at SriLankan Airlines rose by 10% within the first week. Tourist arrivals fell by as much as 80% in the weeks that followed, while hotel occupancy across the country dropped into single digits. SriLankan Airlines turned back to the same playbook it had relied on for decades: transit traffic and South India. Within weeks, the airline joined forces with the country’s tourism authorities, tour operators, and hotel partners to launch a four-month recovery campaign targeting Indian travellers. The initiative featured fifteen holiday packages starting from $180 per person, including flights, accommodation, and ground transport, while Mastercard helped extend the campaign’s reach across India.
Then came a crisis with no regional workaround. “During COVID, we didn’t operate,” says Dimuthu. “The entire fleet was grounded. We only flew repatriation flights and cargo flights. That was it.” The airline adapted the only way it could. Following Airbus’s guidance, seats were removed from passenger cabins to carry cargo, and one aircraft was dedicated entirely to freight. Passenger revenue had almost disappeared, so cargo became the business. “The best example was Nairobi,” says Dimuthu. “We started with just a few flights, then realised there was strong demand to move flowers from Kenya to Australia. It turned into a huge operation and became one of our most profitable.” But not every flight was about keeping the airline alive. “We still had a responsibility,” says Dimuthu. “We brought Sri Lankans home from places like Cyprus, Hamburg, Nairobi and Wuhan and from other places where they needed us. We carried vaccines, flew seafarers home after late-night requests, and operated repatriation missions throughout the pandemic. Over 17 months, we completed 446 repatriation flights. While much of the world’s commercial aviation had come to a standstill, we still had a job to do.”
Some of those flights carried people who simply couldn’t afford to wait. “We transported so many respiratory patients,” says Deepal. “These were cases where every hour mattered.” Dimuthu remembers one family in particular. “There was a baby, about three months old,” he says. “The doctors had given the child only a week to live. The visa was ready, but there wasn’t an aircraft available. We managed to get one.” Then another challenge emerged. The baby’s father, who was due to travel as the donor, tested positive for COVID just days before the flight. “We worked through it,” says Dimuthu. “Everyone came together to make sure the child still got the treatment back in 2020 and that baby is six years old now.”
Keeping those flights in the air meant rethinking almost every part of the operation. “Under the normal rules, our crews would have had to spend fourteen days in quarantine every time they returned to Sri Lanka,” says Dimuthu. “That simply wasn’t practical if we wanted to keep flying. So, we created a crew bubble instead. They took a PCR test before every flight, another when they returned, and remained within the same controlled group between flights. That allowed them to operate again without losing two weeks to quarantine each time.” Passengers, meanwhile, had concerns of their own. “There was a real fear that COVID could spread through the cabin air,” says Dimuthu. “We had to reassure people with facts,” says Dimuthu. “IATA and Airbus had already published studies showing that the airflow in modern aircraft is designed to move from top to bottom, rather than along the length of the cabin. I remember taking those reports myself and explaining them to industry associations and partners because people needed the confidence to fly again.”
Even the corporate communications never stopped. “We did two media familiarisation (FAM) tours from India during COVID,” says Deepal. “The government had introduced a travel bubble concept, so we brought Indian journalists in. They went around the country, and were so happy about it. Sri Lanka was among the first countries in Asia to reopen the country for tourism, and a lot of Indian tourists came.”
The country had barely caught its breath from COVID when, in 2022, the economy collapsed and Sri Lanka ran out of fuel including jet fuel entirely. Three years, three crises, and this one had no easy workaround: SriLankan needed roughly 700,000 litres of jet fuel a day just to keep its own schedule running. “We call it tankering,” says Deepal. “We’d send the aircraft out without passengers to an airport in India, refuel there, and use that fuel for our long-haul aircraft, the ones heading to London, Australia, Europe, the Far East.” A flight to London went out via Cochin instead of direct, refuelling there before continuing on. No flight was cancelled outright. Ten flights became five, run on the fuel that five could actually get. Other foreign airlines flying into Colombo had a different problem entirely: theirs wasn’t fuel, it was getting the US dollars they’d earned back out of the country. SriLankan’s cargo business, close to a third of everything moving through SriLankan air freight, picked up some of what those airlines left behind.
The most recent test came only months earlier. Cyclone Ditwah struck on November 28, 2025, among the worst natural disasters in the country’s history. SriLankan cancelled flights and rerouted incoming aircraft to airports in South India, waiving cancellation and date-change fees for stranded travellers. “I have never seen in my life a flying crew travelling on tractors to get to work,” says Deepal. “Their areas were flooded, so we arranged army trucks to bring them from their homes. What’s more, our airport ground crew stayed at the airport counters for three or four days without going home. I have never seen that kind of dedication anywhere else in this industry.” Within weeks, the airline had launched its own destination recovery campaign, echoing what it had built after 2019, this time for a natural disaster.
Through all of it, one group of passengers never wavered. “Through the Easter attacks, COVID, the economic crisis, Sri Lankans living overseas kept travelling with us,” Dimuthu says. “They were our highest contributor throughout.”
Even through all of that, one line never moved. “We will not compromise on safety, not even 0.1%,” says Dimuthu. He doesn’t dodge the years of delays that came with it. But across a civil war, a terrorist attack, a pandemic and a fuel shortage, SriLankan cancelled almost nothing. It rerouted, it converted, it consolidated, and it kept flying.
The National Carrier Tells Sri Lanka’s Story, and Brings Half of All Tourists In
As Sri Lanka’s national carrier, SriLankan is also tasked with introducing the country to people who’ve never been here. “In some of the places I’ve worked, people don’t know where Sri Lanka is, or what SriLankan Airlines even is,” says Dimuthu. “That’s a responsibility. When we carry that message, we have to do it properly.” Deepal is more direct about the method. “We are not advertising,” he says. “We are telling a story.”
Long before the diaspora carried the airline through several crises, it was building a campaign for exactly them: “Home Away From Home,” launched in 2007, which went on to win a PATA Gold, the Pacific Asia Travel Association’s top annual honour for travel and tourism marketing, judged internationally since 1984.
Some of these stories are about the airline itself. Before 2019, it was binning around 16 tons of retired uniforms, seat covers, and scrap material every year, sending it to landfill at a cost of millions. Mathaka, meaning “memories” in Sinhala, turned that waste into something a passenger could hold: bags, wallets, and notebooks, made in partnership with House of Lonali, a Sri Lankan design house, by artisans from underprivileged communities. In 2022, judged by a panel that included Airbus and the UAE’s civil aviation authority, it beat 118 other submissions, including some of the biggest airlines in the world, to win Best Aviation Sustainability Programme at the SMBR Global Aviation Awards.
In 2023, the story moved north, to a region no campaign, by SriLankan or anyone else in the country, had told before. Colours of Jaffna, built around the city’s Nallur Kandaswamy Festival, a Hindu celebration that runs three weeks, reached over 14 million people on social media and drew 500,000 engagements. It won a PATA Gold in 2024, then a Golden Star at the ITB Berlin Golden City Gate Awards in 2025, a separate competition judged at one of the world’s largest travel trade shows.
By 2025, that approach had produced the most awarded campaign in SriLankan Airlines’ history. The Ramayana Trail, built around the Sri Lankan sites associated with the Hindu epic, targeted the airline’s largest source market, with around 90 weekly flights across nine Indian cities.
“This campaign was one of our most successful,” says Dimuthu. “It wasn’t just people living in India. Indians in Africa, the UK and Australia connected with it too. It resonated with the diaspora just as much as it did with people back home.” The campaign won six international awards, including the airline’s third PATA Gold Award, more than any previous SriLankan Airlines campaign.
Each of these campaigns exists to reach people in a crowded, distracted, digital-first travel market. An airport visit for a group of Samanera monks, marking the airline’s 45th anniversary in August 2024, generated over 2 million digital impressions and close to $25,000 in earned media value. A year later, flying an all-female crew to Bangkok for International Women’s Day generated 1.5 million impressions and roughly $38,000 in value.
The stakes behind them are larger than any single campaign alone. Additionally, “SriLankan Airlines brings about 45% of all tourists arriving by air into Sri Lanka,” says Dimuthu. “When we promote Sri Lanka, we’re not just promoting an airline. We’re promoting the country.”
The Next Decade: A Bigger Fleet, the Same Human Touch
SriLankan has committed to growing its fleet by nearly 60% by 2030, from 23 aircraft today. The route map already shows the shape of that ambition: daily frequencies to Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore have doubled since. “Say you want to go to London,” says Deepal. “You board around half past one, and you land by seven thirty that evening. You can sleep, or go straight to a meeting the next morning. Take a Middle Eastern carrier instead, you’re stuck two or three hours in a layover, and the whole journey runs 14–16 hours. Ours is nine.” For a business traveller, or a parent flying alone, that’s not a minor convenience. It’s often the reason they choose this airline over a bigger one.
That kind of loyalty is exactly what the airline says it exists to earn. The airline’s own vision statement puts it plainly: to be “the airline of choice for travellers seeking a unique, authentic Sri Lankan experience, delivered with warmth, care and hospitality.” Its mission goes further, to grow an airline that promotes the country, supports its people overseas, and builds Colombo into a genuine hub for the Indian Ocean, while training the talent the wider industry will need next. Every system built into this airline- the pricing engine, the fuel routing, the kiosks, the training school- exists to make that ambition accessible.
Beyond accessibility, keeping it human is the other challenge, and the one SriLankan is betting its future on. “Everyone today is trying to bring the human element back and push AI out,” says Deepal. “That’s our strength, our culture. Meeting another human being still matters.” Dimuthu agrees, and takes it further.
“Our strategy has had to change over time. We’ve had the civil war, the tsunami, the Easter Sunday attacks, COVID, the economic crisis, Cyclone Ditwah last year, and now the conflict in the Middle East. Every few years, there’s another challenge. We’ve faced them all, and the airline is always one of the first to be affected.”
“I’m confident SriLankan can go places on two advantages: our people, and our geography,” he says. “No country, however advanced its AI, can replicate either one. Add our technology, and we have a very bright future. That’s our vision for the next decade.”