In August 2026, the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau (SLTPB) launched a marketing campaign, which was five months in the making, promoting Sri Lanka as a holiday destination, after the conflict in the Middle East gutted arrivals from Europe.
A global tourism promotion campaign, a long-term industry demand first planned for launch in 2025 under the present government, is now expected in 2027. Both destination promotion campaigns were delayed due to the government procurement process, suitable for contracting infrastructure projects but unsuitable for procuring creative, public relations, and other marketing services for promoting the country to potential foreign tourists.
Over two decades, Sri Lanka has attempted five national tourism campaigns: A Land Like No Other, Small Miracle, Wonder of Asia, So Sri Lanka, You Will Come Back For More. Everyone of them started, stalled, and died somewhere in the middle. While rival tourism destinations have had Incredible India, Malaysia Truly Asia, and Visit Maldives, to name a few. In its absence, the SLTPB has for years spent its efforts on roadshows, trade fair booths, familiarisation trips, and a handful of digital campaigns. In 2025, the SLTPB had a budget of Rs8 billion for promotions but spent only Rs2.5 billion. Its chairman points to the procurement process: choosing a vendor and signing a contract for even a single promotional activity took 6 months on average.
The industry agrees the country needs a campaign. What stops it is procurement, talent, and politics. “The promotion bureau is marketing overseas,” said Eksath Wijeratne, Vice President of The Hotels Association of Sri Lanka (THASL). “But the procurement system we follow is a government system for construction. There is no separate system for this.”
Money has never been the constraint either. The Tourism Development Fund (TDF) is a statutory fund, set up solely to promote and develop the island as a destination. Every hotel, travel agent, and business registered with the SLTDA pays 1% of its annual revenue into it. Yet procurement guidelines mean the SLTPB can’t spend that money freely. Even where it can, it doesn’t have the people who know how to spend it effectively, not in a world where travellers now ask ChatGPT to plan their next vacation. And should the bureau clear every one of these hurdles and actually launch a campaign, there’s no guarantee it survives the next change of government. Buddhika Hewawasam, Chairman of the SLTPB, doesn’t dispute any of this. He treats it all as the ground reality of the job.
Procurement System
The SLTPB exists to promote the country as a tourist destination, selling Weligama’s beaches, Ella’s hills, and Kandy’s temples to the world. Most of that work happens quietly. Road shows, trade fairs, familiarisation tours, even the short digital pushes run after a crisis- these are what Hewawasam calls “tactical campaigns.”
The global campaign refers to a country-level promotional push, one core story, adapted for each market. Its goal is to define what a stranger thinks of a country before they’ve even looked at a flight. Often, it comes packaged with a slogan: 100% Pure New Zealand, Amazing Thailand, or Wonderful Indonesia. It starts by shortlisting things the country is known for, then leans on whichever two or three fit the audience. For example, ayurveda and culture for Germany, cuisine and beaches for Australia. One marketing agency designs that core concept. Local agencies in each market adapt it from there. Another tracks whether it is working.
In 2025, the SLTPB tried to run both. Rs5 billion was set aside for a global campaign. Another Rs3 billion was meant to keep the routine work running, the road shows, trade fairs, and familiarisation tours. Together, an Rs8 billion budget for promotion for the year.
Yet, only Rs2.5 billion was spent. The global campaign never launched. Not for lack of money. In Hewawasam’s own words, it was “because of particular procurement hiccups.”
“Say that you see a particular market is emerging and you can capture that market by doing a promotion in the next three weeks. It is impossible.”
Procurement: Slow, Inefficient, and Conflicting
The TDF is a statutory fund, created under Section 23 of the Tourism Act specifically to promote and develop tourism. It exists outside the Consolidated Fund, the account that holds most government revenue and funds most public spending. Of every rupee the TDF collects, 70% goes to the SLTPB for marketing. The rest is split between the SLTDA (14%) for regulation, the Sri Lanka Institute of Tourism & Hotel Management (12%) for training, and the Convention Bureau (4%) for conference and exhibition tourism.
But while the TDF is independent, spending it is not. Under Section 32(1) of the Public Financial Management Act, every statutory fund, the TDF included, must procure goods and services under guidelines issued by the National Procurement Commission, the same rules that govern any other government body. The SLTPB has no legal authority to write its own procurement rules. Hiring an advertising agency means completing the same multi-step process every time, whether it’s a road show or a global campaign.
Ask the bureau how that process works, and the answer sounds procedural: a concept is presented, sent to the Ministry, approved by Cabinet, tendered, evaluated, and awarded. Wijeratne says the entire process “takes about six months,” which Hewawasam calls “really good” if it only takes four months.
None of it, in Hewawasam’s account, is anyone acting in bad faith. “The Treasury takes their own time. The Ministry takes the long route,” he said. “Nobody is intentionally delaying anything. But the route itself is such.” That is what makes urgency impossible inside it. “Say that you see a particular market is emerging and you can capture that market by doing a promotion in the next three weeks,” he said. “It is impossible.”
Approval for a destination marketing campaign
Any campaign by the SLTPB needs several approvals before a single tender can go out. By Hewawasam’s own estimate, getting all of it alone takes 2–3 months.
Below Rs200 million, the Ministry of Tourism can approve a campaign on its own. Above it, Cabinet has to sign off, and in practice, the SLTPB takes almost everything to Cabinet regardless of size. Part of the reason is what happens when a campaign gets approved in pieces instead of all at once.
Splitting a campaign into smaller pieces to stay under the threshold allows the Bureau to move faster. But carries its own risk, “legally creating a kind of grey area where someone complains against us, saying we’re running a major campaign and splitting it unduly,” said Hewawasam. The risk is not hypothetical. The Government Procurement Guidelines of 2024 state it’d consider this to be “highly irregular” and “an attempt to circumvent the due process.”
Drawing on his experience as a past Chairman of the SLTDA, Priantha Fernando commented, “The boards and the chairpersons, they will be helpless at times. They have to follow procedure. If not, they risk going before COPE [Committee on Public Enterprises]. So they are better off to go with the procedure, come what may.”
Getting Approval from the Ministry, the Cabinet, and the Treasury
The process of any campaign starts inside SLTPB’s marketing division, which drafts the plan. The first approval comes from the SLTPB board itself, where representatives from THASL and the Sri Lanka Association of Inbound Tour Operators (SLAITO) give the industry a say before the plan leaves the building. The chairman presents the expanded concept and budget. The board approves it or sends it back. This step sits entirely within SLTPB’s own control, and by Hewawasam’s own account, it takes 2 weeks.
From there, SLTPB hands the plan to the Ministry of Tourism. By law, it cannot take a plan to Cabinet on its own. The ministry reviews it on its own schedule and turns it into a Cabinet paper. No statute sets a time limit for it to happen. Describing this stage, Wijeratne said, “It has to go to the secretary,” referring to the Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Employment & Tourism. Multiple directors and assistant directors have to sign off along the way. “Everyone has to be covered,” he adds. When something doesn’t align, the process goes back to square one.
Once Cabinet approval comes through, it covers the whole campaign at once, concept and budget together, not each piece of it. Individual tenders that follow, split out by market and by function, don’t need to make the trip back. Even with Cabinet’s approval in hand, one gate remains before any money moves. “Beyond Rs100 million, it has to go to the Treasury for approval,” said Wijeratne. Only once the Treasury releases the funds can tendering actually begin.
The 42-Day Window for Tenders
Once a tender can finally be called, the law sets a waiting period to receive bids from companies: 42 days for international tenders and 21 days for local tenders.
A single campaign rarely means a single tender either. The SLTPB splits the work by market and by function, one contract for creative, another for digital media buying, another for public relations. Alyna Haji Omar, who led JWT’s “So Sri Lanka” campaign, describes the structure as, “You can tender only for a specific need. You cannot randomly tender for an open appointment. I can only be the agency that is assigned this [specific] contract.” Each tender runs separately and carries its own 42-day or 21-day window, even if they’re part of the same campaign.
The window can shrink to 14 days, but only with approval from the National Procurement Commission. Nowhere else in the entire procurement process is there a mechanism to move faster. Ahead of the announced interim campaign, the SLTPB tried to use this shortcut. “We requested to reduce it to 14 days, so we’d have a saving of 1 month. We put the request in, and it didn’t come.”
Asoka Hettigoda, President of THASL, watched that request cost more than it would have saved by simply running the normal procedure. “We continually ask, ‘Can you reduce that 6 months to 4 months?’ and now it takes 6 months just to get a proposal to request that reduction. Then you wait, only to hear, ‘Sorry. Proposal rejected,'” he said. “Had we embarked on it earlier, we would have a global campaign.” He’s now stopped asking. “We have waited for 15 years. I have no problem waiting for another 6 or 7 months. I just want it to get off the ground.”
Closing the tender isn’t the end of the wait. “Once it’s closed, you need another one month to evaluate it,” Hewawasam said, “the bidders and the evaluation committee need to be in place.” During that month, bids are checked first against the terms of reference on technical merit. Only those that qualify move on to a financial review, a split meant to keep price from influencing the quality assessment. A Procurement Committee then reviews the results and recommends a winner.
Inefficiency at Best, Corruption at Worst
Throughout the entire process, the paperwork keeps moving by hand. Hewawasam doesn’t hedge on what that produces. “The procurement process has a lot of inefficiency. If you take the private sector purchasing approval, it’s all online,” he said. “Here you have to take one file, this file, and that file. It’s real havoc, and there is a chance for corruption as well. In my predecessor’s time, the global marketing campaign was blocked because of that.”
In August 2023, an investigation uncovered a deliberate attempt by SLTPB officials to manipulate a tender for a global campaign’s public relations and digital marketing agencies. They were found replacing documents to favour one bidder over another. 8 senior officials were reassigned to the Ministry. A press conference scheduled with the then Minister of Tourism was cancelled hours before it was due to start. The tender was restarted from scratch.
Hewawasam’s own tenure began inheriting more of the same. “The government only took over in October 2024, so it was virtually in 2025 that we began,” he said. “Underneath there were bribery and corruption issues that we needed to sort out. So we spent the year consolidating those things.” It was the same year that only Rs 2.5 billion of an Rs 8 billion promotional budget was spent.
Launching Campaigns
Naming a winner doesn’t end the process either. A standstill period follows before any contract can be signed, giving losing bidders a window to challenge the result. “Normally if you’re going to give a local tender, you’ll have 5 to 6 appeals,” Hewawasam said. “Global tenders, it’s not the case. After an appeal comes, it’s compulsory to spend another month hearing it.” Haji Omar says the advertising industry itself isn’t blameless in this. “We have a history of agencies blocking, and then the system has to stop, absorb what is happening, and resolve it,” she added.
Even a winner, once confirmed, can be left with nothing to do. Hewawasam shared that under the previous administration, digital agencies were appointed for a global campaign. The matching production agency, the one meant to supply content for them to run campaigns, was never tendered at all. “At the end there’s nothing,” he said. When he took over, those digital contracts were to expire in January 2025, while the production agency tender still had not been floated.
Nothing came of those appointments, and the contracts still had to be settled. Any agency accepting an advance payment from the SLTPB has to match it with a bank guarantee. When the contracts expired, with nothing delivered, the guarantee came due anyway. “One raised a court case, which we settled,” Hewawasam said. “It’s a loss for them, to put a Rs10 million bank guarantee and get nothing.” The number changes depending on the contract, but the mechanism doesn’t. Haji Omar shared that for So Sri Lanka, JWT carried a Rs300 million guarantee against a 20% advance. “Our bank had to prove that we could cover that, which is why smaller companies get left out,” she said.
L-R: Buddhika Hewawasam, Chairman at the SLTPB; Kimarli Fernando, Past Chairperson at the SLTPB from 2019 to 2022; Priantha Fernando, CEO of THASL and Past Chairman at the SLTDA from 2022 to 2026
SLTPB and Modern Marketing
About a year ago, Amitabh Kant, the man who built Incredible India and Kerala: God’s Own Country, visited Sri Lanka. Stefan Furkan, a hotelier with three decades in the industry, said Kant left amazed and asked for nothing in return. “Nobody grabbed the guy and said, ‘ Hey, tell us how to do this,” Furkan said.
Even if the procurement process was fixed, a second problem remains. The SLTPB does not have the people to run an effective global campaign, and the reason is pay. Priantha Fernando said the Tourism Act empowers the board to recruit and set salaries at market rates. In practice, they have not exercised this power, he said, and the result is the same across all four tourism institutions. “Unfortunately they cannot attract the cream,” he said. “What’s being offered is just peanuts.”
The SLTPB’s own vacancy postings bear that out: its senior procurement post pays Rs73,436 to Rs170,720 a month; a Coordinating Officer (Marketing) starts at Rs59,552, capped at Rs124,330. On Rooster Jobs, a private-sector Marketing Manager role requiring a decade of experience paid Rs200,000 to Rs300,000 a month in the same year; a Head of Sales and Marketing, Rs300,000 to Rs400,000.
In February 2026, Prof. Ruwan Ranasinghe, Deputy Minister of Tourism, told Parliament the SLTPB was leaning on the Asian Development Bank for consultancy support to shape its next global strategy. “Sri Lanka Tourism doesn’t have the capacity to run such a vast project,” he said. Asked directly whether that expertise existed in-house, Hewawasam gave the same answer: “No.”
The bureau’s response has been to borrow the capacity it can’t pay for. It is working with consultants funded by the ADB and the World Bank to build what it calls a campaign monitoring unit, tasked with setting targets and KPIs and tracking how a contracted agency performs once a campaign is live. None of this is new. When Kimarli Fernando led the SLTPB through the COVID years, she recruited Sri Lanka’s former commissioner of government procurement to help her navigate tenders, but the bureau could not pay him. “Because I can’t pay it, I got one of the funding agencies to pay his salary,” she said. “Otherwise, it would take another month to make a tender.”
Digital marketing for modern travellers
The gap matters most in one place. “What was lacking here is digital media,” Hewawasam admitted, while reflecting on the bureau’s activities in 2025. “We had a few campaigns after the Ditwah crisis. One thing we are not familiar with, and not using, is the latest AI tools and the latest developments of social media.”
The shift he’s describing shows up in the numbers. More than half of Gen Z travellers now use short-form social video for destination inspiration, according to Deloitte’s 2025 survey of global travellers; among millennials, adoption of artificial intelligence for trip planning grew 1.5 times since 2024. At the luxury end, high-net-worth travellers continue to rely on boutique agents over online platforms, McKinsey found.
Malik Fernando sees the same shift from the other side of the industry. “The traveller today won’t pick up a brochure at a travel fair,” he said. “Sri Lanka has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to seed these platforms with the right narrative. Our digital footprint as a destination is essentially accidental. It is shaped by the type of traveller we happen to attract, by travel advisories, by whatever content finds its way online organically. That is not a strategy. It is the absence of one.”
SLTPB’s Rs2.5 billion spend in 2025
Most of the SLTPB’s actual Rs2.5 billion promotional spending in 2025 went to trade fairs and road shows. In India, the bureau ran road shows beyond the traditional Mumbai-Delhi-Chennai circuit, into Tier 2 cities like Ahmedabad, Surat, and Hyderabad, and the wider Andhra Pradesh region. We had a strategy of doing road shows for specialised segments,” Hewawasam said. “We do it for weddings. We do it for high-end tourists.” According to the SLTDA, 2025 saw 531,000 Indian arrivals, more than any other source market. Road shows also opened in Australia and New Zealand for the first time, with Australian arrivals up 22% to 109,487. In Singapore, the bureau pitched marine tourism at the ADX trade fair. Thailand’s push centered on Buddhist trails. It began promotions in Korea after years of silence, though only 6,918 passengers flew from Seoul that year. Almost everything above, Hewawasam said, were “trade fairs we participated in are B2B,” paired with familiarisation tours for journalists, bloggers, and influencers, most from India. Europe told a different story: consumer promotions actually happened there- a fair in Russia, tram ads, supermarket campaigns- but almost all entirely offline.
The pattern is not new. Sri Lanka, Malik Fernando said, has not run a sustained, professionally executed national campaign since 2011. “The playbook being followed today was written in the 1980s, when tourism marketing meant trade fairs, brochures, and relationships with tour operators, because that was how travellers booked their holidays,” he said. “The internet didn’t exist. That world is gone.” Haji Omar traced it to a habit that calcified even earlier. “When it started, roadshows were the big buzz in tourism,” she said. “So now you see this unnatural sort of weightage given to roadshows.”
The most recent round of tenders, set to launch together at the end of July, reflects the same pattern. A public relations and digital campaign for Australia, worth Rs100 million over six months, closed bids on May 19th. A separate Rs90 million tender for B2B networking sessions in Sydney, Adelaide and Perth, targeting 150 travel agents and tour operators alongside 21 journalists and 15 influencers, is scheduled for September. A German PR and digital campaign worth Rs100 million over eight months closed bids on June 1st. A three-month tram advertising campaign is planned for Vienna. Digital campaigns for India, China and Russia are scheduled for September. One contract breaks the pattern: a two-year, Rs70 million agreement for a single agency to run the SLTPB’s global social media presence.
Government change and tourism promotion
Procurement delays can strand a campaign for months. A change of government can kill it altogether, regardless of how far along it is. Sri Lanka has examples of both. The cause is always the same. Sri Lanka has tried to run a national destination marketing campaign five times in roughly twenty years: A Land Like No Other, Small Miracle, Wonder of Asia, So Sri Lanka, and You Will Come Back For More. None has survived a change of government.
Since 2005, ten people have held the post of tourism minister. Since 2007, thirteen people have chaired the SLTPB. That’s across six governments, including Mahinda Rajapaksa’s two terms separately. Almost without exception, each arrival meant the last campaign died with the last minister.
In October 2023, Sri Lanka unveiled “You Will Come Back For More” at the International French Market (IFTM) Top Resa, a B2B travel trade show in Paris. Built under then-tourism minister Harin Fernando, by Ogilvy at a cost of Rs1.45 billion, it was to run in 12 markets. A second phase, Rs1.2 billion to expand into Russia, Australia, the Middle East, Japan, Korea and Europe, was budgeted for 2025.
But politics moved faster than the campaign could. Anura Kumara Dissanayake was sworn in as President on September 23rd 2024. Two weeks later, Hewawasam was appointed chairman of the SLTPB. The NPP won the Parliamentary Elections in November, and Vijitha Herath became Minister of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Employment and Tourism. On December 6th 2024, three weeks after the new government came to power, “You Will Come Back For More” was scrapped. Phase two never launched. “This tagline was created to woo back tourists and is not relevant today as Sri Lanka has won a lot of recognition in recent times internationally,” Hewawasam said. “We need to look afresh and come up with a strategy that attracts all markets.”
This was not the first time a change of government killed the campaign. Mass protests during the Aragalaya drove President Gotabaya Rajapaksa from office in 2022; he resigned by email from Singapore. Parliament elected Ranil Wickremesinghe, who appointed Harin Fernando Minister of Tourism and Lands. Kimarli Fernando, who had chaired the SLTPB Table 02 Chairpersons of the SLTPB, 2007 – 2026 Period January 2018 – June 2018 Tenure Duration 5 months Chairman SLTPB Esala Weerakoon (acting chairman of SLTPB) The agencies meant to support the industry, including the SLTPB, have their own history of instability. 13 people have chaired the SLTPB since 2007, with an average tenure of under 1.5 years. Several lasted under 1 year. Others changed mid-term, with no election or new government. Buddhika Hewawasam is the latest entry in that same pattern. In August 2026, he resigned as Chairman of the SLTDA, the dual role he’d held alongside chairing the SLTPB since October 2024. In a letter to the Secretary of the Ministry of Tourism, he cited personal reasons. Alongside his resignation, it was announced that Suranjith Wewawita would replace him. Hewawasam remained through COVID and the economic collapse that followed, and by mid-2022 was running two procurement processes: a global promotion campaign and a tourism app cataloguing 5,000 locations across the island. Both had reached Cabinet paper stage, ready to be tabled. After Harin’s appointment, both were abandoned. “The next cabinet could have just approved that cabinet paper, as is,” Kimarli said.
The agencies meant to support the industry, including the SLTPB, have their own history of instability. 13 people have chaired the SLTPB since 2007, with an average tenure of under 1.5 years. Several lasted under 1 year. Others changed mid-term, with no election or new government.
Buddhika Hewawasam is the latest entry in that same pattern. In August 2026, he resigned as Chairman of the SLTDA, the dual role he’d held alongside chairing the SLTPB since October 2024. In a letter to the Secretary of the Ministry of Tourism, he cited personal reasons. Alongside his resignation, it was announced that Suranjith Wewawita would replace him. Hewawasam remains Chairman of the SLTPB, the post this story has followed him through.
Pattern repeating over 25 Years
Before the war ended, Sri Lanka had only one real campaign: “A Land Like No Other,” a multi-channel effort, advertised on CNN and BBC through the 2000s while the conflict with the LTTE was still being fought in the north. For the 25 years since, Sri Lanka has been trying to replace it.
“Small Miracle” was Sri Lanka’s first attempt to sell itself as a country. It died within weeks, due to the government’s discomfort with the word “small.” The campaign debuted at ITB Berlin in March 2009, after a year-long tender headed by Dileep Mudadeniya, now a Senior Vice President at John Keells Holdings. At its domestic launch, then President Mahinda Rajapaksa never appeared; he addressed the room by video instead. Within days, “It was cancelled while the guests were gathered at the BMICH awaiting the arrival of the Chief Guest,” recalled Dr. Rohantha Athukorala, who sat on the technical committee. That same week, Rajapaksa transferred Minister of Tourism Milinda Moragoda to Justice and Legal Reforms. No reason was given, though political sources named the logo.
L-R Asoka Hettigoda, President at THASL, Eksath Wijeratne, Vice President at THASL, Alyna Haji Omar, Founder and CEO at Audacity, Malik Fernando, Chairman at Resplendent Ceylon, Stefan Furkhan, Chairman and Chief Executive at The Confifi Group
Rohantha Athukorala took over as SLTPB chairman in February 2015, during the Yahapalanaya government of Maithripala Sirisena. Seven global advertising agencies were shortlisted. Proposals were due in three months. “The teams worked past midnight to make the deadline,” said Athukorala. A month before the deadline, the SLTPB Board was dissolved. Two days before the deadline, the tender was cancelled. Athukorala estimates that the agencies spent almost Rs10–15 million each preparing proposals. This was the Yahapalanaya government’s first attempt to replace the “Wonder of Asia” campaign it inherited from the second Mahinda Rajapaksa government.
“Wonder of Asia” was launched in 2012. At the time, Basil Rajapaksa held the tourism portfolio as a function of his Ministry of Economic Development. The campaign’s target was 2.5 million tourists by 2016.
Its budget started near Rs500 million and grew to Rs3.4 billion by 2015; much of it was absorbed by trade fairs and trips inviting foreign journalists. The tagline was on the SLTPB website until August 2017 and lives on in the courts. Investigators found Rs7.8 million meant for the campaign was diverted into 12,000 T-shirts for the Uva Provincial Council election. In May 2026, a magistrate ordered Basil Rajapaksa’s arrest and two others. The next hearing is scheduled for October 14th.
Political volatility
The Yahapalanaya government’s second attempt at a global campaign fared differently. So Sri Lanka actually launched. The contract, worth Rs314 million, went to JWT under Alyna Haji Omar. “I often thought maybe the pitch was the hard part,” she says. “But the pitch was the easiest part.”
In October 2018, with the campaign already live, she watched a constitutional crisis unfold from her office in Colombo. The stand for the World Travel Market in London was already at the printers, billed in sterling. Meanwhile, the first payment, 20% of the contract, roughly Rs60 million, was frozen inside the impasse. JWT could have pulled out, entirely within their rights. She kept going on faith. “You could call it reckless,” she says. “I like to call it brave.”
Before launch, JWT briefed the opposition as well as the government. The SLPP leadership, gathered at Prof. G.L. Peiris’s house the week before the crisis, came away happy with the branding. Separate briefings followed for President Sirisena, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, the Foreign Ministry, ambassadors, and, in Haji Omar’s words, “anybody that we thought could put a spoke in the wheel.” The crisis still nearly ended the campaign before it launched. It survived only on her decision to keep going.
The instability didn’t end there. Five chairmen cycled through the SLTPB as the crisis unfolded, each arriving with the same verdict passed down from trade critics: this is rubbish. “And I just sat there explaining to the other person, it’s not rubbish,” she says.
Finally, on Christmas Eve 2018, the bureau called to tell her the long overdue cheque was ready. The BBC team arrived shortly after, and by March had finished producing a documentary about Sri Lanka. It premiered at ITB Berlin, unveiled to the world’s travel media, and went viral, with synchronised toolkits releasing the same material across every market at once, dubbed into Chinese, French, Japanese, Hindi, and more.
Then, on Easter Sunday 2019, a series of bomb ings killed 269 people, including 39 tourists, at three churches and three hotels. Within 24 hours, Haji Omar had assembled a crisis communications team staffed by experts who had managed responses to the London and Paris attacks. A plan was ready. It needed one thing: a Cabinet paper authorising the spend. Crisis response fell outside JWT’s original scope, and the normal tender process made no provision for emergencies. The paper never came. The crisis response stood down. The marketing campaign that was supposed to follow it never launched.
A new global marketing push
For most of this story, Hewawasam has been open about the challenges his institution faces. The procurement chain that eats months before a single tender is called. The digital and AI skills he admits the bureau doesn’t have. The predecessor’s contracts that collapsed into a lawsuit. He hasn’t disputed any of it. What he’s offered instead, across two long conversations, is an account of trying to move forward inside a system he didn’t design and can’t step outside of. The interim campaign, launched in August after a five-month delay, was the first proof of that. The global campaign is the next attempt to do so.
“The plan is to pump money into the campaign every 2 years,” Hewawasam said. Rs5 billion for the first two years. Rs7.5 billion for the two after that. Rs10 billion for the two after that. It’ll be a “2-2-2” structure, reviewed and increased at each stage, running through to a first milestone in 2030. Industry norms call for spending 0.5–1.5% of tourism revenue on marketing.
“Initially we can’t put that much towards it,” he said, “but we’ll phase it out in such a manner where we’ll establish the brand, then continuously invest in brand building and marketing.” Procurement for it is meant to begin in September 2026, running through the standard 42-day tender window, closing by January or February 2027. “By March next year,” he said, “we’ll be ready with the agencies for the global campaign.”
That slow start isn’t only about money. It’s also about how many tourists the country can welcome and develop the product it offers them. “You just cannot expect that you are spending Rs5 billion today and being like, say, doubling the tourism, doubling the revenue next year,” he said. “If we double our arrivals, the airport will face a massive congestion problem. The airport development is just starting, and it will only be completed in 2028.” The product side tells the same story. He shared that the bureau is focusing on a handful of areas to widen what the country sells. Weddings and conferences. Wellness and spiritual retreats. Sport tourism. Entertainment, aimed at filling Colombo’s empty weekends. Alongside these, a push into marine and adventure tourism. None of it is finished. The campaign is being paced against a product under construction.
The rollout follows the same steps in every market. A local agency builds the campaign’s core concept. From there, it’s handed to PR agencies in each country the bureau is targeting for tourists. Each one researches its own market and works alongside a digital agency there. Together, based on what that research finds, they shape the concept into a campaign built for that specific audience.
Underneath all of it sits a smaller, more basic gap: the bureau has never had its own library of content to draw on. “A state tourism body needs an open-source library of content,” Hewawasam said. “We don’t have that, which is why we’ve assigned a production agency.” That agency has already been appointed and will focus first on producing content from known attractions. “We have now started the process of building the library and promoting local influencers and photographers to create content,” he said, aimed at surfacing rare destinations within the island. Content like that already exists. Much of it is made for a local audience, in Sinhala or Tamil, out of reach for the foreign traveller looking to go off the beaten path just as much as the influencer who made it. Hence, the bureau is planning a content creation hackathon. It’s meant to identify these creators and train them to make that same content accessible to a global audience. From there, the bureau hopes to keep them engaged, not as a one-off, but as an ongoing partnership.
Even with the money, the pacing, and the content in place, he isn’t promising a fast result. “For a brand to restart its own presence and impact, it will take at least a good 5 years,” he said. His own reference point is Vietnam, a campaign launched around 2010 that took roughly fifteen years to grow arrivals from 2 million to 5 million.