Sri Lanka Tourist Arrivals · SLTDA Monthly Reports

The Gulf conflict: India up 21.4%, every other market down 7.9%

The four months from March to June ran 85,148 arrivals behind 2025, a drop the SLTDA attributes to the Middle East conflict. India added 51,689 visitors over the half, which is why the six-month total finished just 1.8% below last year.

By Dilanke Panagoda · July 2026

Sri Lanka received 1.15 mn foreign visitors between January and June, 1.8% fewer than in the same six months of 2025. The total barely changed, but the markets underneath it moved in opposite directions. India sent 51,689 more visitors than last year, up 21.4%. The other markets, sixty-plus of them, sent 73,160 fewer between them, down 7.9%.

The SLTDA’s 2025 Year in Review, published in April, singled out three rising markets in a chapter of its own: “The Rise of Non-Traditional Markets: Russia, Bangladesh, and Poland”. In the first half of 2026 those three lost 48,415 visitors between them, and India’s growth alone more than made up for all three.

The half that followed grew more concentrated on every measure, with more of its visitors coming from one market, flying on two airlines, entering through Indian airports, and staying for shorter trips.

The sections that follow measure the conflict’s cost, trace that concentration market by market, examine June as the first month after the conflict, and close with the five new flight routes scheduled before December.

01

85,148 visitors short of matching 2025, 172,345 short of its January pace

Two counterfactuals show where the half would have landed without the conflict, both built from the SLTDA’s monthly table.⁷

The lower line repeats each conflict month’s 2025 arrivals, zero growth from March; the upper holds the +12.9% pace January and February actually ran. The half landed 85,148 short of the first and 172,345 short of the second.

The arithmetic: January and February banked a 63,677 lead over 2025; the four months after Gulf airspace closed gave up 85,148; the difference is the closing deficit of 21,471. The SLTDA’s March report, working from hub shares rather than counterfactuals, put that single month’s loss at a “minimum of 81,600 tourists”.

Not everything in the shortfall is the conflict: Russia’s slide was underway in January, and June laps an Eid-inflated month. Through February, though, the year ran 12.9% ahead of 2025. After the airspace closed it beat 2025 exactly once, in May, and that on India alone.

02

Without India there was no rebound: −0.6% in May, −19.1% in June

January and February were the strongest months anywhere in the SLTDA’s two-year table. The conflict that closed Gulf airspace on 28 February took the next two: March and April fell about a fifth each. May recovered 9.6%; June gave 9.9% back. The half netted out 1.8% behind 2025 and 1.6% behind 2018: eight years apart, three half-years of the same size.

Now remove India from every month, using the India figures each report prints beside its own.⁵ Without India, the other sixty markets show a very different year: more modest growth in January and February, deeper falls in the conflict months, and no May rebound at all, exactly as the May dispatch found. Their June fell 19.1%, with the corridor open and the conflict over, as deep as any conflict month.

The cumulative path shows how the flat total was assembled. At the end of February the year ran 63,677 ahead of 2025. Two conflict months later it was 20,607 behind. May recovered 12,826 of the gap; June widened it again, to the closing 21,471.

03

The corridor reopened in June. Arrivals fell 9.9% anyway.

June was the first month of 2026 without an airspace crisis in it. The report notes the conflict ended within the period, and the airport tables show the Gulf corridor reopening.¹

Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah were the last departure point for 21.3% of June’s visitors, up from roughly 7.6% at the March trough and still thirteen points below January.

The corridor was open, yet June was the lowest month of the half. June is always the low point of Sri Lanka’s year, so the fair comparison is June against June: last June averaged 4,608 arrivals a day, this June 4,152.⁶ On a daily basis this June also ran 8% below April, the worst month of the conflict. The recovery in the year-on-year figures did not show up in the daily counts, which fell.

Two mechanisms explain most of June, and neither is the corridor. The first is India’s calendar.

May’s 60,342 Indian arrivals were the largest single-market month anywhere in the table; June’s 43,423 is the seasonal ebb from that peak, still 14.5% above last June. Four-fifths of the whole month’s decline from May is one market coming down from its own record.

The second mechanism is more surprising: the Western markets had their worst month of the year in June, after the conflict had ended.

Each June figure sits far below the market’s own half-year change. The tables don’t record when a trip was booked, but if long-haul travel is planned months ahead, June is the first month whose planning window sat almost entirely inside the conflict. The pattern fits that reading; the data can’t confirm it.

A third, smaller mechanism is the calendar again. Last June contained Eid al-Adha; this year it fell on 27 and 28 May.² The markets that travel on that holiday are lapping an inflated month: Pakistan’s June fell 67.1% against a 2025 figure larger than Germany’s or the United States’ that month, Bangladesh’s 41.0%, the Maldives’ 18.9%. The May dispatch recorded the other half of the swap, when Eid pulled Gulf-region arrivals into May.

What held June up was visiting friends and relatives. VFR travel accounted for about 18,700 arrivals, level with last June’s 18,543; the entire year-on-year decline happened in non-VFR traffic, which fell 11.6%.⁴

The 2025 Year in Review had called VFR the market least sensitive to shocks, and the conflict ran the experiment. Australia (+19.3% in June, a third of its visitors VFR) and the United Kingdom (36% VFR in June) were the two Western survivors of the half; Canada, the most VFR-dependent market of all in June at 69%, fell anyway. The rule is a tendency, not a law.

04

The three markets 2025 celebrated gave up 48,415 visitors

The 2025 Year in Review’s diversification chapter rested on three names: Russia, up 189% on 2018 and the third-largest market; Bangladesh, up 468% and newly inside the top ten; Poland, up 145%.

Against the first half of 2025, Russia is down 31.1%, Bangladesh 32.7%, Poland 10.1%. The trio’s combined loss, 48,415 visitors, is more than twice the whole market’s net decline. India’s gain covered all of it.

Each of the three fell in its own way. Russia’s is the most consistent decline in the tables: every month lower than the last, from 27,134 arrivals in January to 1,276 in June, a slide that predates the conflict. By June the half-year’s third-largest market ranked nineteenth in the month, behind Israel and Spain.

Bangladesh’s fall came with a concentration the appendix tables reveal: 43.9% of its remaining June arrivals flew one small carrier, FitsAir.

Poland compressed hardest of all: above 10,000 a month in January and February, then 1,139 in March and never above 600 from April. Poland is a winter-season market, and from March those spring arrivals all but disappeared.

The traditional markets did not rebound in a V shape. Of January’s top ten, eight peaked in January or February; only India (May) and Australia (March) peaked later. By June, every one of those eight ran below half its own peak month. The fell-then-recovered shape of the overall total matches none of their individual paths.

The United Kingdom is the sharpest case, because the half-year average hides it. For the half, the UK reads +0.6%: the second-largest market, apparently stable.

June runs 64.5% below January. The flat half-year number is a record January and February averaged against four months at a third of that level, and it will flatter any market with a strong first quarter.

China is the near-exception, up 15.8% on the half: the recovery the 2025 review said had not yet arrived.

Chinese traffic transits Hong Kong, Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur rather than the Gulf, so the conflict left its routings alone; in April, China was briefly the month’s second-largest market. The gain was banked early, though. Arrivals peaked in February and by June ran 6.6% below the same month last year. Whether the recovery holds without the routing advantage is a second-half question.

The widest swings of the half sit below the top ten.

Israel’s 1,836 June arrivals are 220.4% above last June, the fastest rise of any market, and its half-year total is flat (+0.7%): the entire year’s gain landed in the month the conflict ended. Iran is at the opposite end, down 80.3% for the half, a larger absolute loss than Poland’s or Canada’s. And Southeast Asia is compounding: Myanmar, Vietnam and Indonesia are all up more than 40%, small volumes moving fast, and Vietnam’s doubling happened without a single nonstop flight between the two countries. That detail matters in section 07.

05

Two airlines carry 48.5% of arrivals, and Indian airports send a third

The reorganisation runs deeper than the league table. Regionally, Asia and the Pacific overtook Europe as Sri Lanka’s largest source region this half, +12.2% on 2025 against Europe’s −12.8%.

Europe’s headline decline needs one adjustment before it reads as a European story: of the 75,484 visitors Europe lost, Russia accounts for nearly half. Without Russia, Europe fell 8.4% rather than 12.8%.

The steepest regional decline of the half was elsewhere: the Middle East, counted as a source of visitors rather than a transit corridor, fell 20.8%, to 11,300 arrivals, the same region whose airports the recovery now runs through.

The busiest airports shifted with the source regions. In January and February the single busiest gateway to Sri Lanka was Dubai. From March it was always an Indian metro: Chennai for three months, then Delhi in June at 10.2% of all arrivals. India’s four main airports delivered 19.8% of January’s visitors and 31.8% of June’s, while the four Gulf hubs moved the other way, from 34.1% to 21.3%. India is now both the largest source of visitors and the largest set of entry airports.

The airlines concentrated hardest of all.

SriLankan Airlines and IndiGo carried 33.9% of January’s arrivals between them. When the Gulf carriers’ share collapsed in March, the pair’s combined share jumped sixteen points in a single month, and it has not fallen back: 48.5% in June, even with the corridor reopening. IndiGo’s share doubled while its actual passenger numbers fell 7.6%, and SriLankan’s own volume nearly halved. Neither airline grew; their share rose because the market around them shrank faster.

Put the concentrations together and June looks like this: three markets (India, the UK, Australia) supplied 50.3% of the month’s visitors, two airlines carried 48.5% of them, and one country’s airports handled a third of them.

The January 2026 report’s themed essay had argued for the opposite, for spreading arrivals across more sources and gateways. The half that followed concentrated on every measure it tracks.

06

The average visit shrank a fifth. The receipts arithmetic points 15% down.

The June report’s themed section covers duration of stay, and frames the half as a May dip with a June rebound. The table it prints supports a longer reading: every long-stay market ends the half below where it started.

Only India and Singapore, the two shortest-stay markets in the table, held level, and Germany’s June follows an unusually long 7.5-night May. June is longer than May, but measured against January the average stay shortened steadily across the half.

Weight those stays by each market’s arrivals and the two shifts compound. In January, the average visitor from the twelve tracked markets (about two-thirds of all arrivals) stayed 9.9 nights. In June, 7.7: a fifth shorter.⁴ Most of that is the mix, more Indians at five nights, fewer Dutch at fifteen; the rest is that stays shortened inside almost every market at once.

This is the half’s largest financial risk, because the SLTDA’s income model multiplies arrivals by nights by spend per day. Arrivals fell 1.8%. Nights compressed. Spend per day was already falling before any of this: the Year in Review’s spend-per-day base dropped from $171.74 for January to July 2025 to $148.26 for August to December, a 13.7% step down that predates the conflict entirely.

No 2026 income figure has been published yet. Every input that will produce it moved in the same direction. The mix moved toward the market that stays the shortest; leisure’s share of June arrivals rose to 63% from 49.8% a year before, while the segments the 2025 review wanted to grow (MICE at 7% of June, business at 4%, wellness at 0.3%) stayed where they were.

The same formula lets the receipts be bracketed, as an illustration rather than an estimate.⁸ The first half of 2025 earned $1,712.6 mn on the SLTDA’s monthly income table. If this half’s visitors had stayed and spent exactly as visitors did in early 2025, receipts would have fallen only with volume, about $31 mn short. If they spent at the base the SLTDA measured for late 2025, the gap widens to roughly $261 mn, 15.3% below the first half of 2025, and that is before counting the shorter stays documented above. The published figure, when it comes, will settle where in that bracket the half landed; every input measured so far points toward the wide end.

07

From August, five new routes aim at the exact gaps this half exposed

The June report closes its connectivity section with the observation that direct long-haul connectivity from Europe, East Asia and Oceania “remains comparatively limited”. In the second half of 2025 that limitation looked like this: one carrier flew nonstop from the United Kingdom (SriLankan Airlines’ daily Heathrow service), no carrier had ever flown nonstop from Vietnam, and no low-cost carrier flew from Australia.

Between mid-August and late December, on schedules the airlines have published, that map gains five scheduled services, four of them nonstop in both directions.³

Vietnam Airlines and VietJet open the first-ever nonstops between Ho Chi Minh City and Colombo. Jetstar’s Melbourne service is Australia’s first low-cost nonstop. British Airways returns to Colombo after roughly a decade, from Gatwick for the winter season, alongside SriLankan’s Heathrow service rather than replacing it. French Bee’s seasonal Paris Orly service stops in Malé on the way out, with the Colombo-to-Paris leg flying nonstop.

Set against this half’s data, each new route lines up with a specific finding. Vietnam’s market doubled with no direct flight at all; from August it has six weekly ones. Australia was the West’s one growing market, on the VFR strength every report describes, and Jetstar’s low fares are aimed at exactly that diaspora traffic. The United Kingdom’s monthly collapse happened on one carrier’s capacity; from late October there are two.

Every one of the new services is a nonstop that bypasses the hub system this half showed to be fragile, and each one dilutes, at the margin, the two-airline concentration the half produced. The reports have asked for route diversification in every issue this year, and these are the first scheduled routes to deliver it.

Whether those scheduled seats become arrivals is what the tables from July onward will record. Sarendia does not forecast, so here is the benchmark instead: 2025 closed at 2.36 mn visitors, and matching that requires 1.22 mn arrivals in the second half, 1.8% more than the second half of 2025 produced.

The comparison months are not level ground. September 2025 grew 30.2%, the strongest month of that year and the hardest to lap; December, at +4.2% the weakest (the SLTDA suggests Cyclone Ditwah as a possible cause), is the softest. The 40-country visa waiver announced in May runs out inside the window, in November. And UN Tourism’s May barometer, quoted in the June report, scores expert confidence for May to August at 105, down from 117 at the start of the year, with the conflict expected to shave 1 to 2 points off global arrivals growth.

Read as one number, the half was uneventful: 1.8% behind last year, 1.6% behind 2018. Read as two, it was a reorganisation. India grew 21.4% and everything else shrank 7.9%; the diversification 2025 celebrated reversed into the deepest single-market dependency in the tables; two airlines took half the traffic in one month and kept it; and the average visit shortened by a fifth while the only published spend figure was already falling.

The first half’s question was what the shock would do, and the tables have now answered it. The second half’s question is scheduled rather than speculative: five new services, roughly 3,100 seats a week by late October, pointed at the exact markets and chokepoints this half exposed. The next six tables will say whether they fill.