Dilshan Rabbie, Founder and Chief Executive of Ceylon Haven, shares insights into building a unique travel brand, one that prioritises intimacy and safety in travel. Rabbie focused on establishing an emotional connection over volume, resisting automation in favour of thoughtful curation and genuine hospitality.
Balancing corporate roles with entrepreneurship, Rabbie told Echelon how he embraced resilience and self-trust, and how his leadership style is defined by deliberate slowness, attention to detail, and conviction that great ideas thrive under constraint. Ceylon Haven is less a business and more a crafted response to what travel could be.
Excerpts of the interview follow :
You launched Ceylon Haven in 2020, during a global crisis. What prompted you to build a brand in such uncertain conditions, and what kept you going?
It began with frustration. I was someone who found refuge in travel, especially down south, but suddenly I was boxed into four walls with nowhere to go. At the same time, the government was encouraging travel within bubbles, and I remember thinking, ‘Sri Lanka doesn’t have an answer to this.’ We were accustomed to the hotel model, where you share buffets and swimming pools with hundreds of others. But what if travel could be something else – personal, isolated, yet together?
That was the seed of Ceylon Haven: creating a curated portfolio of villas where people could reconnect safely, without compromise. In hindsight, we weren’t just launching a brand, we were introducing a new way for Sri Lankans to travel. What kept me going? Probably the belief that the best ideas come when everything else feels like it’s standing still.
Ceylon Haven prioritises connection over quantity. In a market obsessed with growth metrics, how do you define success?
For us, success isn’t volume – it’s resonance. We still have guests from our very first month of operations, who return to us religiously, reaching out the moment they plan a trip. That tells me we’re doing something right. Every touchpoint, from the ease of booking to the warmth of our property staff, is designed to feel personal, not transactional. And the villas themselves? We don’t list a lot. Just the right ones. That’s our promise.
Our collection isn’t just curated; it’s coveted, and each home is held to a meticulous standard. Many of our villas are family-run, and the staff have become part of our extended brand family. They’re the real custodians of the guest experience. We’re not just curating villas, we’re quietly reimagining what high-trust, hightouch travel looks like in Sri Lanka for the next decade.
What did you learn while balancing a full-time senior marketing role while building a luxury travel brand?
You learn the art of ruthless prioritisation and the joy of doing hard things for the right reasons. Holding senior marketing roles at various blue-chip companies while building Ceylon Haven meant living two professional lives, often in parallel universes. One taught me structure, scale, and the power of brand; the other taught me intuition, instinct, and gut feeling. Ceylon Haven became a sandbox for applying everything I’d learned in big brand marketing, plus a lot more heart. The biggest takeaway? Building something of your own trains a different muscle – resilience. You stop waiting for permission. You start backing your own decisions, even when the roadmap doesn’t exist yet.
You chose to lean on storytelling, curation, and community rather than technology and automation. How has that shaped your guest experience?
One of our guests booked a stay to celebrate her father’s 70th birthday. She told us he’d never taken a proper holiday in his life – always too busy working, always putting everyone else first. We arranged a quiet beachfront dinner, just him, his children, and a sky full of stars. When she wrote back, she said he almost cried when the cake came out.
Not because of the setting or the food, but because it was the first time in decades, he felt like someone had truly seen him. That’s what happens when you design travel not for mass appeal, but with individual lives in mind. Every villa we list is chosen because it has the potential to hold moments like that. You can’t automate that kind of feeling; you have to build it intentionally.
That’s what we mean by curation. Every villa isn’t just a pretty space; it has soul, which is why we call them Spaces with Spirit. And because we’re not automated to the bone, our guest experience doesn’t feel templated. People write to us and we personally write back, not a bot. They’re remembered. Their preferences are picked up, not inputted. In a world trying to scale everything, we chose to slow it down, and our guests feel that.
What advice would you give to professionals who want to start something on the side but are waiting for the perfect conditions or opportunities?
Start with a decoy project. Not the big dream. Not the perfect business plan. Just something small, quiet, or even silly. Something that gives you permission to experiment without the pressure of it having to “succeed.” That’s how Ceylon Haven began for me. I didn’t call it a brand at first; I called it a hobby, a side idea, a travel listing with good taste. That gave me room to try things, fail quickly, and move without fear of judgement. And eventually, it became the thing I was most proud of.