The island nation hopes to attract over 3 million visitors in 2025, but amid segregation and rising prices, many in the country worry about the impact of further rapid expansion
In December, Dutch traveler Tom Grond posted a short video on his Instagram account. “I found Bali 2.0 in Sri Lanka,” he wrote. In the reel, one could see a beachfront restaurant with a thatched roof, tables on the sand, local staff with broad smiles, coconuts on the countertops, a resident puppy and white tourists on beanbags. On the menu, coconuts were $2 and kombucha $3 — more than half the daily wage of a worker who handpicks the tea leaves that make this fermented beverage. On the sea, a couple of fishers sat on stilts with their fishing rods. The waves ebbed. The sun reddened.
The cafe in Grond’s video was in Ahangama, a small town 88 miles south of the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo. Traditionally a fishing town, it is now one of Sri Lanka’s busiest tourist spots, widely known for its coconut palm-lined shoreline, and is promoted as a surf destination and digital nomad hotspot during the peak season that runs from December to April. Cafes, bars, hotels and restaurants line the busy coastal highway and are slowly creeping into the town’s forested interiors. Their menus are almost always identical, with smoothie bowls, avocado on toast and vegan poke on offer.
As Sri Lanka pushes for a strong tourism industry following the country’s worst economic crisis in 2022, the faces of many cities and towns in the island nation are changing. Small grocers and local food stalls are being replaced by groovy cafes, restaurants and yoga studios that most locals cannot afford. They instead cater to foreign tourists with bigger pockets.
Moreover, foreigners are increasingly taking over local spaces — sometimes illegally — running businesses and offering services almost exclusively designed for Western tourists. Within these gentrified places, local food is hard to come by. Locals are experiencing increasing hostility, both from foreigners and other Sri Lankans in the industry, being edged out and often made to feel like outsiders in their own country.
Even though it is illegal for shops, restaurants, hotels and public entertainment places in Sri Lanka to refuse entry to anyone based on race, religion, caste or sex, a recent video circulating on X shows a local owner refusing entry to a group of local travelers at a souvenir boutique in Galle Fort, a tourist destination in Sri Lanka’s south.
Social researcher Amalini De Sayrah said that she has seen “foreigners only” signs at accommodation and spas and on party flyers, which are sometimes written only in Sinhala so that foreign tourists don’t notice the discrimination locals face. Small- to mid-budget restaurants and bars have turned down De Sayrah and friends when they spoke in Sinhala, she claimed.
“It forces locals to either restrict their travels or to go to fancy, expensive places that don’t explicitly say locals aren’t allowed — though from their design and price point, you can say they were not designed for locals,” added De Sayrah. Although a fraction of locals may afford these places, for those on a tighter budget, it often means “paying more for spaces you don’t feel welcome in,” she told New Lines.
In January, when photographer Tashiya de Mel visited the Lion’s Rock — an ancient rock fortress in Sigiriya that was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site — with her parents, she noticed that foreign tourists had separate parking lots, entrances, ticket booths and washrooms. Local tourists had their own, but their parking lot was far from the entrance, making it difficult for the elderly and disabled people to access the popular destination.
Later, when de Mel shared her experience on Instagram and asked her followers if they had experienced something similar, one person shared how, on a busy public holiday, local tourist guides directed foreigners to skip the line while elderly Sri Lankans had to wait in the sun to climb the Lion’s Rock. Others responded with experiences of being refused entry at restaurants or paying fees for beach parties when foreign visitors didn’t need to pay.
Although the Sri Lankan government established the Ceylon Tourism Board in 1966, tourism only began to grow in the country in 2009, after the nearly 30-year-long civil war ended. Despite the state’s reported war crimes, Sri Lanka was branded as a “paradise island,” bringing hundreds of thousands of visitors in search of idyllic tropical beaches, tea country-bound train journeys and historical sites – all offered at a seemingly lower cost, at least financially, than many other destinations across the world.
However, even at that time, railway stations kept segregated washrooms for local and foreign travelers. The washrooms for locals were musty, with stained walls, cracked doors, wet floors and overflowing bins while the “foreigners only” washrooms were a lot cleaner.
Now, as more and more tourists arrive in the country, the segregation between local and foreign tourists is far more noticeable. Young white backpackers, who generally spend less money than locals, are more “welcome,” while travelers of color, even if they are high spenders, face scrutiny and racism, alleged De Sayrah. She said that, if this continued, it could discourage travelers of color from traveling to Sri Lanka.
Earlier in January, Pakistani-American content creator Nabila Ismail posted a video on Instagram sharing how Sri Lanka’s tourism industry catered to white travelers. The video showed that she was often the only person of color in wellness centers or outdoor spaces flooded with white tourists who were “surprised” to see a brown person.
“I did not receive the same treatment as other travelers, especially in the south of Sri Lanka,” she told New Lines. (Apart from Ahangama, backpacker-friendly Unawatuna and surf hotspot Weligama in Sri Lanka’s south follow the same trends.) “Sometimes, people thought I was Sri Lankan. White tourists were greeted with smiles while I had to flag down the staff several times for them to take my order. They did not greet me the same and never came to check on me like they did with other tables.”
This mindset of white foreign tourists being entitled to better treatment than locals and tourists of color stems from lingering colonial-era norms and internalized racism. White foreign tourists, especially when they can afford to go on such wellness retreats, are perceived to be wealthier than an average Sri Lankan earning money in local currency.
“When I’m the only person of color in a luxury hotel or a wellness space, it feels like I need to justify it or provide an explanation … about what I do for work, I must live abroad, I must not be Sri Lankan, but white tourists don’t have to explain themselves,” Ismail said.
“Our generosity is truly heartwarming, but the perception that locals are not deserving of that hospitality or that foreigners are more deserving of it is informed by things like the gamble that is the tourism economy,” De Sayrah said. Foreign revenue is seen as essential to Sri Lanka’s economy, and when it comes to attracting it, “anything goes.”
Tourism is often considered a key driver of Sri Lanka’s $84 billion economy. According to the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority, tourism was the country’s third-largest source of foreign exchange in 2018 (after remittances and the apparel export industry); tourist arrivals reached a new peak of over 2.3 million visitors. However, the industry directly contributed only $4.3 billion, or 4.9% of the country’s GDP that year, which stood at $88 billion. In 2024, the country drew a little over 2 million tourists.
But successive governments and industry authorities often portray tourism as the island’s only saving grace, aggressively promoting Sri Lanka to the world and focusing on the number of arrivals. In 2023, the government launched a global tourism marketing campaign with the slogan “You’ll come back for more,” offering a free visa to visitors from several countries, including Russia, India and China. The Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau planned a $5 million promotional campaign last year to work with foreign influencers, including popular vlogger Nuseir Yassin, known as Nas Daily.
“Tourism brings income to the country, but right now, there’s very little benefit to the local communities,” said professor Athula Gnanapala, who teaches tourism management in the Faculty of Management Studies at Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka. Most profitable businesses in different parts of the country are operated and managed by businesspeople in Colombo, who tend to hire people from the capital. “If the hotel is owned by someone from Colombo, and if the people working in it are also from Colombo, it doesn’t benefit the local community” outside the capital, said Gnanapala.
Locals who have little to no access to opportunities for formal education and training in hospitality are often employed in menial, low-paying jobs. “But anyone — rich or poor — can be involved in tourism and benefit from it if there’s a proper mechanism to encourage, empower and broaden their capacities,” Gnanapala added.
The push to attract more tourists is also being met with concern. This year, Sri Lanka’s government wants 3 million tourists. By 2028, it wants 5 million. “My concern is whether we really have to go for that number,” Gnanapala said. In his view, the strategy should focus on the number of tourists the country can accommodate in a year given the availability of hotels, services and staff — without overcrowding the attractions.
With the country’s limited resources, unplanned and abrupt growth in tourism could hurt Sri Lanka. For instance, the government’s ambitious plans have not accounted for waste management or managing crowds. A study published by the University of Kelaniya found that in Unawatuna, a popular tourist town in the south, hotels, guest houses and restaurants that don’t have proper waste drainage systems release their waste into bodies of water, polluting both surface water and groundwater.
Researchers have often cited tourism’s negative effects, including foreign tourists working illegally, taking away locals’ jobs. Governments across the world are implementing policies and laws to tackle illegal employment, sometimes without much success.
For instance, when Sri Lanka witnessed a surge in tourists from Russia and Ukraine after war broke out between them in 2022, there were reports that people from both countries were possibly bribing immigration officials to obtain resident visas and run unregulated, unregistered hotels and restaurants that evade taxes. Otherwise, a long-term tourist visa is valid for only six months.
It is illegal to work as a tourist in Sri Lanka, but many foreign tourists provide services as DJs, bartenders, surfers, photographers and therapists. Many Russian tourists often end up in Russian-run businesses, sending the revenue back to their country.
Last year, a Russian-run cafe’s “whites-only” party led to a public outcry. While the Department of Immigration and Emigration ordered Russians and Ukrainians to leave the country or apply for fresh visas, the notice received pushback from then-president Ranil Wickremesinghe.
Even the number of Israeli tourists coming to Sri Lanka doubled to 20,000 in 2024, many of them off-duty soldiers looking for an escape from the ongoing war in Gaza. In eastern Sri Lanka’s small surf town of Arugam Bay, home to some 4,000 people — most of them Muslims — there are now about 1,000 Israelis. There were reports of tiffs between local surfers and tourists over surfing etiquette.
While foreign tourists are setting up businesses in the country, locals are looking for work abroad. Gnanapala shared that brain drain remains a big issue in the tourism industry. Thousands of locals — some of whom are skilled professionals with industry training — leave Sri Lanka every year, as both wages and working conditions remain poor, making it difficult for them to live in these tourist-centered locations. In 2024, more than 311,000 Sri Lankans sought employment abroad, according to the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment.
Local tourists are also increasingly being priced out. “You see it now. You have a handful of hotel rooms, and then there are a lot of tourists who want these rooms, so the price goes up and locals can no longer afford it,” Gnanapala said. Gradually, as prices of goods and services go up, the cost of real estate also increases, which drives locals away from their homes. This has also deterred local tourists from traveling to the country’s southern coast.
Explaining the way forward, Gnanapala emphasized the importance of involving locals in tourism development, with plans that would directly benefit them while reducing the impact on the environment, culture and natural resources. When outsiders — both foreigners and Sri Lankans from other parts of the country — come and open a hotel, “their primary concern is to make profits,” he said. “But for locals, it’s their home, their land, the place they were born.”
“Tourism can be great for the local economy, just as it can be hurtful,” Ismail said. She feels that increasing foreign presence is wearing away the island’s identity. Aspects such as wellness, Ayurveda and a connection with nature are “marketed as foreign concepts … making Sri Lankans feel like outsiders in their own country,” she said. “Tourism should elevate local culture, not replace it.”
“Right now, I feel like [tourism] is taking away a lot more than it’s giving,” added de Mel, the photographer. She said that Sri Lanka needed to be smart and strategic in the way it positioned itself and “think about the type of tourists we attract, the type of tourism we want.” Recently, activist Riz Razak raised similar concerns on Instagram, emphasizing the need for better infrastructure, planning and regulations to curb the rise of illegal foreign workers.
“What do we get out of opening up to outsiders and losing everything that is of cultural, historical, natural value?” de Mel said. “Is all of this even worth it?”
By Zinara Rathnayake
Zinara Rathnayake is a travel, food and culture writer based in Sri Lanka.
