The real cost of unregulated tourism in Sri Lanka

THE recent discussions surrounding “dark tourism” in Sri Lanka raise an uncomfortable but necessary question: are we slowly losing control of the tourism industry we worked so hard to build?

- By Chandra Wickramasinghe

To answer this honestly, we must first understand how Sri Lankan tourism evolved.

Over the last four decades, Sri Lanka’s tourism industry has largely followed the same trajectory as other Asian leisure destinations such as Goa, Bali, Phuket, Pattaya, and parts of Thailand. Sri Lanka was initially introduced to the world through charter operators and mass-market tourism built around the classic “SSS” concept — Sun, Sand, and Sea.

At that stage, tourism was formal, operator-driven, and largely controlled through licensed travel agents, hotels, and recognised tourism stakeholders.

However, the tourism landscape globally has changed dramatically over the last decade.

Today, tourism is considered an invisible export. Travel decisions are increasingly influenced not by National Tourism Organisations (NTOs), but by Instagram reels, TikTok trends, WhatsApp communities, YouTube vloggers, underground social media networks, and informal digital promoters. Destinations can become globally popular overnight without a single official tourism campaign.

Unfortunately, this same system has also created fertile ground for what many now refer to as “dark tourism.”

Who provides for dark tourism? It is rarely the mainstream tourism industry.

Dark tourism ecosystems are generally facilitated by informal and often illegal operators promoting narcotics, underground parties, sex tourism, and uncontrolled nightlife experiences. In many cases, these businesses operate through loopholes in existing laws. The real operators are often foreign entities using locals as fronts while marketing aggressively within nationality-based WhatsApp bubbles and closed social media circles.

This has been happening quietly for almost a decade.