Arrivals came back in May. The route didn’t.

May arrivals came in 9.6% above May 2025, almost entirely on India. The Gulf hubs that carried a third of January’s visitors carried 18%.

By Dilanke Panagoda · June 2026

May brought 145,745 visitors to Sri Lanka, 9.6% above May 2025 and the first year-on-year increase since February. After two months in which arrivals fell by a fifth and then by more, the headline reads as relief: the slide stopped, and the year crossed one million arrivals with seven months to spare.

Read one level down and the relief gets specific. The recovery has a single owner, and the map underneath it has been redrawn. The SLTDA’s 2026 reports carry a table the headline numbers don’t: the last departure airport of every arrival. Five months of it is enough to watch Sri Lanka’s main door close in March and reopen halfway by May. This dispatch reads the year so far through that door, in eight questions.

01

What did May add up to?

Two record months, two conflict months, one rebound. January’s 277,327 and February’s 279,328 were the strongest months anywhere in the two-year table, 9.7% and 16.2% above 2025. March and April gave most of it back, down 19.8% and 22.3% against last year: declines the SLTDA attributes to the conflict that disrupted Gulf airspace and the transit hubs behind roughly a third of Sri Lanka’s arrivals.

May’s 145,745 leaves the year at 1,022,022 visitors through five months, 7,781 behind the same point in 2025, a gap of 0.8%.

02

Who carried the rebound?

India did, and then some. Its 60,342 May arrivals, 28.4% above May 2025, are the largest single-market month anywhere in the table, landing in Sri Lanka’s nominal off season but squarely inside India’s summer holiday window.

May’s net gain over last year was 12,826 visitors; India’s gain alone was 13,341. Every other market combined finished 515 behind. Without India, May fell 0.6%, and the year to date is down 6.5% rather than 0.8%.

03

Which doors closed?

In January, 34.1% of all arrivals made their last departure from Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi or Sharjah. February held near 34%. Then the corridor shut: by March, Doha had fallen below the report’s 1% charting threshold¹, and Istanbul, at 5.6% of arrivals, was a bigger gateway to Sri Lanka than Dubai at 4.6%. April crawled back to roughly 10%. May recovered to 17.7%: half the January share.

The slack went to the national carrier and to India’s. SriLankan Airlines peaked at 34.1% of arrivals in March and carried 29.2% in May, with IndiGo at 21.1% behind it.

04

Where is the proof, market by market?

April’s report carries the one table that ties markets to routes, and it reads like a controlled experiment. Australia, which sends 87% of its visitors via Asian hubs or its own airports and 1.0% via the Gulf, is up 10.7% for the year.

The United Kingdom, 22.4% Gulf-routed in April, fell hardest in the conflict months and was back to flat (+0.3%) by May; its cushion was Heathrow, the last departure point for 1,869 of its 10,425 April arrivals. France had no such cushion. Just 29 of its 5,844 April visitors left from Paris, 27.2% came through the Gulf, and May was still 21.6% below last year.

Russia looks like the exception and is not: 82.5% fly Moscow direct, and its 31.1% year-to-date decline was already underway in January, before the corridor closed.

05

What moved underneath India?

India isn’t the only South Asian movement in the table. Bangladesh, a top-five market as recently as last year, has lost 30.9% of its arrivals against the first five months of 2025 and fell 45.2% in May alone. Iran has all but left the table, down 80.9% for the year.

Pakistan is up 43.9% and the Maldives 13.6%, with the Maldives’ May figure up 44.0% on its own. Net out India and South Asia is down 15.9% this year; with India in it, the region reports +14.5%.

06

What does +72.6% from the Middle East mean?

The Middle East is the report’s loudest small number: 3,370 May arrivals against 1,953 a year earlier. Two things sit behind it. The corridor reopened, and the calendar moved: Eid al-Adha fell on 27 and 28 May this year against 6 and 7 June in 2025, pulling the Gulf holiday window into May.

The UAE nearly doubled (+91.0% vs May 2025), with Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt up from tiny bases; the Maldives’ May surge a section up keeps the same calendar.

Cumulatively the region is still 21.6% behind last year, and at 8,462 arrivals across five months it remains a corridor first and a market second.

07

What did May change on paper?

In May the government extended visa waivers to citizens of 40 countries for six months, and the SLTDA’s report gives the policy a three-page feature, citing research that easing visa rules lifts arrivals by five to twenty-five percent depending on scope.

Sarendia doesn’t forecast, so here is the measuring stick instead. The 40 countries supplied 89.7% of this year’s arrivals so far (916,771 of 1,022,022) and 87.8% of May’s.

The list reads as a map of demand Sri Lanka already has. What it leaves out is the sharper edge: Bangladesh, the fastest-falling top-ten market, isn’t on it, and neither is the Maldives, May’s sixth-largest source. When the six months lapse, this is the baseline the policy can be read against.

08

What do they come for?

Purpose-of-visit data turns the league table into portraits. Leisure leads everywhere, at 63% of all May arrivals, but the second purpose is where markets diverge. For Australia and the United Kingdom it is visiting friends and relatives (VFR): 28.2% and 27.0% of their visitors came to see family and friends, the diaspora showing up in the data.

A fifth of May’s Russians (20.9%) came for MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions); 12.1% of Chinese arrivals came on business; Germans over-index on Ayurveda and wellness at 3.0%. India, for all its volume, travels lightest on family ties: 3.6% VFR, with leisure at 60.0%.²

Two readings of May are both true. The league table says Sri Lanka recovered: arrivals up 9.6% on last May, the million crossed, the slide stopped. The route map says the recovery rests on one market arriving through its own door, while the corridor that carried a third of everyone else stands half open.

June’s table will say which reading travels. What five months already establish is narrower and firmer: in 2026, where visitors come from has mattered less than how they get here.