Sri Lanka should pivot to competing on wellness instead of its beaches, according to Vickum Nawagamuwage, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Santani, the country’s first wellness resort. He has believed for years that Buddhist mindfulness practices, Ayurvedic medicine, and the country’s natural landscape are stronger assets than its coastline. However, these assets have yet to be used properly.
In a conversation with Echelon, he notes that the platform Book Retreats named Sri Lanka the world’s top trending wellness destination for 2026 in its State of Retreats report, citing a 100% year-on-year rise in traveller interest, ahead of Australia, Morocco, England, and Spain. Sri Lanka achieved that ranking without running a national campaign, and this confirmed to Nawagamuwage that the country could become the world’s “healing island”, centered around wellness experiences. However, it needs a strategy to pursue this.
In his view, Sri Lanka’s tourism industry is not short of raw material, and has never really had to compete hard to succeed. What it has lacked, he says, is a clear idea of where it stands today and a plan for where it wants to go next, something he feels applies to the wider economy as much as it does to tourism.
Diminishing Returns
According to Nawagamuwage, around 75% of Sri Lanka’s hotel rooms sit on the coast, a pattern he traces back to the 1970s, when the country’s “sun, sea, sand” positioning faced little regional competition. This is no longer the case. For one, the Maldives now offers a stronger beach product outright, and Bali’s and Thailand’s offerings are of comparable quality as well as at a lower price.
“Our beaches are still a draw, but they’re not our best card anymore,” says Nawagamuwage. “We’re competing with places that either do it better or do it cheaper.”
He points to the interior of the country as the bigger opportunity: wildlife, mountains, heritage sites, and nature-based experiences, which by his estimate account for fewer than a quarter of the country’s hotel rooms. He also notes that parts of the south coast now popular with tourists were largely developed by foreign investors after the 2003 ceasefire opened the country up to outside capital, while, in his view, Sri Lankan investors were slower to move on the same opportunities.
He points to the interior of the country as the bigger opportunity: wildlife, mountains, heritage sites, and nature-based experiences, which by his estimate account for fewer than a quarter of the country’s hotel rooms. He also notes that parts of the south coast now popular with tourists were largely developed by foreign investors after the 2003 ceasefire opened the country up to outside capital, while, in his view, Sri Lankan investors were slower to move on the same opportunities.
Most of them offered little beyond a good feeling in the moment, backed by claims about tradition or celebrity endorsement rather than any real explanation of why the practices worked.
That gap led to Santani. He explains, “Most of what the West sells as wellness actually comes from the East. Ayurveda, yoga, meditation, Chinese medicine. Someone else took it, packaged it, and built an industry out of it. I didn’t see why that couldn’t happen here, with the real thing.”
Sri Lanka already had the source material, he points out. Buddhism contains many of the mindfulness practices the wellness industry has repackaged as breathwork and meditation, while Ayurveda offers a documented medical tradition alongside it. What Sri Lanka lacks, in his view, is operators who are capable of making these offerings a complete product instead of treating them as cultural background.
Since opening in 2016, Santani has built up a track record that backs up the wider argument. The resort has been named among Tatler’s eight best spas in the world and one of Forbes’ 25 most unusual hotels, and was the only Sri Lankan property, and one of just eight from Asia, featured on TIME’s World’s Greatest Places list.
Nawagamuwage points to this recognition as evidence that a Sri Lankan brand can compete at the top end of global hospitality without following the standard luxury playbook, and Santani is now expanding beyond Sri Lanka, with properties coming up in Oman, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia.
Value Beyond Room Count
Sri Lanka’s tourism numbers tend to centre on arrivals, but Nawagamuwage considers this an incomplete metric without data on how much value said arrivals generated. Even average daily spend, he notes, is often estimated through surveys rather than tracked directly.
He shares an analysis he carried out while serving on a tourism advisory board under the previous government. By his count, Sri Lanka has roughly 75,000 listed hotel rooms nationwide, of which only around 200 sell for more than $500 a night, and roughly 70,000 sell for under $100.
Based on that breakdown, he estimates that if Sri Lanka grows from 2.5 million to 10 million annual visitors while keeping the same mix of rooms, the country would generate around $15 billion in tourism revenue. But if the share of rooms priced above $500 a night grew to around 1% of total stock, and the $300-plus tier expanded to roughly 10,000 rooms, he estimates revenue at the same 10 million visitor target could reach closer to $30 billion.
“We’re not talking about a massive shift,” he says. “Going from 200 rooms to 2,000 over ten years is nothing. But that alone could mean a difference of billions in revenue.”
The Casio and the Rolex
A common objection to this kind of shift, Nawagamuwage says, is that promoting luxury tourism will squeeze out smaller, budget operators. However, he sees an opportunity for all to benefit. “A guest paying $100 a night still wants to stay somewhere better one day,” he says. “A guest already paying $1,000 a night has no reason to trade down. It’s the difference between owning a Casio and a Rolex. The Casio owner wants the Rolex eventually. The Rolex owner never wants the Casio.”
Applied at a national level, he sees that logic more as a branding argument than a trade-off. If Sri Lanka positions itself as a high-end, aspirational destination in the way the Maldives has, budget travellers are not excluded from the story. In his view, they gain a reason to see Sri Lanka as somewhere to work towards, while the ceiling for the whole market moves up at the same time.
The Healing Island
Nawagamuwage’s case for wellness rests on more than local assets. He points to a global shift in how people manage stress, and Sri Lanka is positioned well to meet it. In the United States, the most widely prescribed category of medication now addresses mental health, ahead of drugs for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. That is evidence of a need most destinations have not properly addressed. He says, “When the whole world is stressed, we offer rest and relaxation. That’s our unique selling point.”
He says visitors consistently describe Sri Lankans as a welcoming, easygoing group, particularly compared to some neighbouring destinations. This trait, paired with native spiritual and medical traditions, gives the country a credible claim to the wellness space that other destinations would need years to build from nothing.
Building the Strategy
Sri Lanka has cycled through multiple tourism taglines over the past decade, none of which Nawagamuwage thinks met the goal of building an association with the country or its offerings for a global audience. That could change if the island formally adopts and builds on the wellness identity it already has. Sri Lanka also has resources that contribute to this goal, including a spiritual tradition rooted in mindfulness, a documented medical practice in Ayurveda, and a natural landscape that supports both.
Nawagamuwage suggests a simple strategy: expand the top end of the room market by a modest amount, measure the value tourism creates alongside arrivals, and build a national identity around wellness rather than another slogan that fades out within a few years. Santani, with its own run of international recognition and its expansion into new markets, is proof to him that the model works at the level of a single resort. The next step, he says, is for the country’s tourism bodies to build the same case at a national scale.