Collection
Luxury in Sri Lanka is unusual in that the best properties are small: a five-bedroom tea planter's bungalow with its own staff, a Bawa-designed hotel on a headland, a tented camp at the edge of a national park. Our luxury itineraries string those together with private guiding, unhurried pacing, and the kind of access that has to be arranged in advance. Costed to the properties you choose, so tell us the standard you have in mind.
The island's finest stays are rarely the largest. A colonial tea bungalow in Dickoya or Bogawantalawa comes with a cook, a butler, and a fireplace for the evening, sleeps a family, and costs less than a suite in a chain hotel. Geoffrey Bawa's hotels — and the generation of architects that followed him — produced coastal properties that are still the reason some people come. Near the parks, tented camps put you inside the buffer zone and at the gate before anyone else.
Pacing is the other half of it. Luxury itineraries here use fewer bases and longer stays: three nights in the hills rather than one, a full day held back for nothing in particular, and transfers timed so you are not arriving at a beautiful hotel at ten at night with an hour to enjoy it.
The things that need arranging are arranged. Private after-hours access at certain sites, a table at the restaurants that book out weeks ahead, a helicopter transfer when the drive would swallow a day, an Ayurvedic doctor's consultation before a treatment programme rather than a spa menu.
Starting points, not fixed departures. Tell us what to change and we will re-cost it.
Priced to your trip
Priced to your trip
Less the international five-star brands than the island's small properties: colonial tea bungalows in the hill country, Bawa-designed and Bawa-influenced coastal hotels, and tented camps near the national parks. Most have between four and twenty rooms, and the service is personal rather than corporate.
The range is wide enough that a headline figure would mislead you. A boutique hill-country hotel and an exclusive-use tea bungalow with its own staff are different propositions, and peak season between December and March prices differently again. Tell us your dates, party size, and the standard you have in mind, and we will build to that budget honestly — including telling you when it is better spent on fewer nights at a better property.
Yes. Most hill-country bungalows are taken on an exclusive basis with their own cook and staff, which works well for families or two couples travelling together. They need booking further ahead than hotels, particularly between December and March.
On two routes, usually: airport to the south coast, and the hill country to a national park. Both are long drives that eat a day. Elsewhere the drive is part of the trip and the road is more interesting than the air.
