A lack of trained staff and regulations to protect customers is hurting Sri Lanka’s ability to attract more tourists, GOVERN Wickramasinghe, the marketing director at the hotel group, for wellness holidays, like yoga, Ayurvedic treatment, and meditation, although these visitors spend more money and stay for longer, according to Ruwan Ranasinghe, Deputy Minister of Tourism.
Wellness tourists to Sri Lanka stay an average of 14.7 days and spend $197 a day, significantly higher than the average tourist’s 8.1 days and $148 daily spend.
Ranasinghe says that wellness therapists lack training and some centres oversell basic treatments as something more advanced. A lack of storytelling also keeps prices lower than the assets should command. Closing those gaps will decide how much of the wellness travel trend Sri Lanka can seize to fill its rooms during its off-seasons, he says.
Global wellness tourism spending was $1 trillion in 2024, and is forecast to grow 40% by 2027, said Maxime Wickramasinghe, the marketing director at the hotel group Thema Collection. The average wellness trip to Sri Lanka costs $1,668, he said, 36% more than a typical tourist spends on holiday.
Sri Lanka’s Ayurvedic medicine practice, rare herbs, rain forests and beaches make it a competitive wellness destination, according to BookRetreats, an online platform for booking wellness holidays.
“We are not capturing the value,” Maxime Wickramasinghe said. Tourism arrivals rose 15.1% from the previous year to 2.36 million travellers, but earnings rose only 1.6%, to $3.22 billion, according to the Central Bank data. The season peaks from November through February and troughs in April, May and June, according to the SLTDA. Arrivals in May 2025 were 132,919, less than half of December’s 258,928.
“Sri Lanka’s wellness packages run between $1,300 and $1,600, according to the MDF’s research, cheaper than South Korea and Taiwan, but above Thailand’s own mid-range floor of $1,200. Sri Lanka has ingredients its competitors lack and still occupies a narrow, mid-tier band instead of commanding a premium.”
Wellness Travellers Visit When Others Don’t
Europe, and Germany especially, have anchored the market for decades, said Asoka Hettigoda, President of The Hotels Association of Sri Lanka (THASL). “Now we want to do it for Australians, the Japanese, and all other nationalities,” he said.
Japan’s outbound wellness spending is projected to reach $6.45 billion by 2034, up from $1.34 billion in 2023, according to MDF-commissioned research. Australia ranks as the world’s fifth-largest wellness travel spend market, “spending an average of $4,824 a year”, said Nipuni Daluwatta, Business Advisor at MDF, an Australian government-backed organisation supporting private business development in emerging markets. More than half of Australian travellers, 56%, want a wellness component in their holiday, and that demand is accelerating: interest in wellness-specific holidays rose 43% in 2025, according to Tourism Research Australia.
Japan’s two biggest holiday periods, Golden Week in April and May and Obon in August, fall outside the island’s peak season. So does Australia’s winter, June through September.
“At least 40% of Ayurvedic guests are repeat clientele,” said Hettigoda, the highest repeat rate in hospitality, a pattern Chandra Wickramasinghe sees too: his 17 properties run at roughly 60% occupancy regardless of season.
A Weak National Brand is Keeping Prices Low
Reaching those new markets means competing on more than climate and treatment rooms. “Authentic Ayurveda is practised natively in only two places: South India and Sri Lanka”, said Chandra Wickramasinghe. Yet none of that has translated into price power. Sri Lanka’s wellness packages run between $1,300 to $1,600, according to the MDF’s research, cheaper than South Korea and Taiwan, but above Thailand’s own mid-range floor of $1,200. Sri Lanka has ingredients its competitors lack and still occupies a narrow, mid-tier band instead of commanding a premium.
“We don’t know how to tell the story to the world,” Chandra said. “India is giving a better story than us.” India’s wellness packages range from $700 to $2,800, well above Sri Lanka’s ceiling, despite sharing the same claim to authentic Ayurveda. Kerala shows what closing that gap requires. The Indian state’s advantage was never traditional medicine alone, said Nipuni Daluwatta. It built the infrastructure first: business support, service standards, certification for therapists, and only then layered a branding campaign on top. Thereby, collectively giving international travellers confidence in what they were booking.
Further east, Bali makes the branding case on its own. The island drew nearly 6.95 million foreign visitors in 2025, almost three times what all of Sri Lanka welcomed, according to Indonesia’s statistics agency. Its wellness packages sit at $1,100 to $2,500, placing them in the same broad range as Sri Lanka’s, yet it isn’t known for hotel chains. It’s known as a destination built around healing and spirituality. Sri Lanka has comparable assets to build that identity, Daluwatta argued: “The central highlands, we could promote as a jungle-based, nature-based healing destination. Can we promote east coast Sri Lanka as a coastal, slow-travel wellness experience?”
Without Regulation, the Workforce Stays Unlicensed and Standards Stay Loose
The branding problem sits on top of a more basic one: Sri Lanka hasn’t built the regulatory floor Kerala put in place before it marketed anything. Indigenous medical products and practitioners currently operate with no formal legal structure, said Ranasinghe. “What is absent is bringing them into the real legal framework,” he said. “Registering them, and monitoring, and improving quality.”
That gap lets some centres oversell what they deliver. “Most of these wellness centres highlight that we are doing Panchakarma,” said Prof. Herapardhenia of the University of Colombo. “It is not correct, because Panchakarma is a clinical treatment procedure. What most of these centres are doing is the body massage and the steam boxing. These are pre-treatment steps.”
The same gap affects the workforce. “Even the well-experienced therapists we have, they have issues because they don’t have a license,” said Chandra Wickramasinghe. Labour ministry inspectors periodically ask where staff are trained, and often there’s no answer. Part of the problem is cultural, too: therapy work carries a stigma, particularly for women, who often don’t tell their own families what they do. None of this is a supply problem. Sri Lanka’s universities graduate close to 400 students a year with Ayurvedic Medicine degrees, more than the industry absorbs, said Herapardhenia. What’s missing is a structured pathway connecting those graduates to jobs.
The Efforts Underway to Bring in More Wellness Travellers
None of these gaps are news to the people trying to close them. Sri Lanka is now moving on three fronts at once: regulation, education and marketing, each aimed at a different piece of the problem this story has laid out.
On regulation, a joint cabinet paper is advancing registration and monitoring for wellness and medical practitioners, said Ranasinghe. Alongside it, a revision of the Ayurvedic Act is underway by a committee that includes Hettigoda and Herapardhenia. One bottleneck is already being resolved: the rule that stops hospitals from training their own therapists. “This qualification is fully authorised, but they can only give it if there’s no restriction from the Ayurveda side, which we’re addressing,” Ranasinghe said. “Soon it will be solved.”
On education, universities have started building the pathway Herapardhenia says was missing. Most now offer certificate courses in massage and yoga therapy, a first step towards full diplomas. One university has gone further, launching a diploma specifically in wellness tourism to connect graduates directly to industry. On marketing, the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau has launched a Rs1.5 billion campaign targeting six markets, including Australia, China and India, running through April 2027. A larger, Rs5 billion global campaign follows that March.
The pressure behind all three efforts is the same: Sri Lanka is filling more rooms without earning propor tionally more from them. “Our ambition must be not merely to attract more tourists, but more high-value, high-spending travellers who stay longer,” Hettigoda said. Whether Sri Lanka closes that gap depends on whether a traveller who already stays 14.7 days and spends $197 a day becomes the rule, rather than the exception.