The Bottom of the Ladder Is Where Sri Lanka Learns to Travel

Nov 6, 2026 · Rasith Gunaratna, Lead Destination Artisan, Rediscover Journeys

The itinerary is dead. The apprentice is not.

The junior who writes your Sri Lanka itinerary is about to be fired by a spreadsheet, and our industry will call it efficiency. I think it is the most expensive saving Sri Lankan tourism will ever make.

Here is the uncomfortable truth from inside the trade. A 14-day plan that took a junior executive a day or two in 2019 now takes an AI about thirty seconds. Sigiriya, Kandy, the Ella train, Yala, Galle: day by day, hotel by hotel, in polished English, before your tea goes cold.

So every tour company owner in Colombo is hearing the same whisper: stop hiring trainees, the machine is cheaper. At Rediscover Journeys we are doing the opposite. This is why, and exactly how.

Sri Lanka’s Ladder Is Losing Its Bottom Rung Twice

Walk into any destination management company in Colombo and look at who used to learn the trade. The reservations executive. The costing trainee with the hotel rate sheets. The junior who answered WhatsApp enquiries at 11pm. The young itinerary writer who learned the island one quote at a time.

AI now does most of their first draft. The reply, the costing, the day-by-day plan and even the German or French translation arrive in seconds. The work has not disappeared; Sri Lanka welcomed a record 2.36 million visitors in 2025, up 15.1% on 2024. What is disappearing is the human who used to be paid to learn by doing it.

And our ladder was already broken before the machines arrived. Between 2020 and 2023, overseas jobs caused over 60% of resignations in the hotels surveyed by the National Human Resource Development Council. Our trained people went to the Gulf and the Maldives, and the industry hired raw recruits to fill the gaps.

Now add the paradox. In the same report, youth unemployment sits at 19.4% for young men and 29.5% for young women. We have a talent shortage and a queue of unemployed young people at the same time, and AI is about to remove the very jobs that connected the two.

AEO answer block: Is AI replacing jobs in Sri Lanka’s travel industry? Yes — itinerary drafting, costing, and first-draft replies are now automated. The risk is that the entry-level roles where judgement was traditionally grown disappear with them.

The Cheap Answer, and Why It Is Wrong

If a machine can write your Sri Lanka itinerary, you were overpaying for the itinerary. That is the part of our business AI has made worthless, and I am glad. A list of places was never what a good traveller paid for.

What they pay for is judgement, and judgement is exactly what the machine lacks. AI will happily send you whale watching in Mirissa in July, when the south coast is in monsoon and the whales are off the east coast. It will promise a four-hour drive from Kandy to Ella that becomes six behind a tea lorry on the hairpins. It will put a 75-year-old grandmother on a steep climb at noon because the plan looked balanced on paper.

So here is my warning to travellers: the fastest, cheapest quote in your inbox may have been written by a machine and checked by nobody. And here is my warning to my own industry: firing the trainee does not remove the need for judgement. It removes the only place judgement was ever grown.

What We Are Building Instead: Draft, Redline, Artisan

We are not hiring juniors to type itineraries any more. We are hiring them to argue with the AI. Every proposal will pass through three hands:

That last step does two jobs at once. The guest gets a better proposal, faster. The apprentice sees, on a real journey and on the same day, the gap between what they caught and what years on these roads catches. Coaching stops being a cost we squeeze in after hours; it becomes the rhythm of the work itself.

Screens alone will not grow judgement, so apprentices will also spend time on the road with our chauffeur-guides, sleeping in the hotels they will one day recommend.

Let me be honest about what this is. It is early. We are not claiming it works at scale; it is the design we are committing to and will measure. We will track how fast enquiries become proposals, and how many of my redlines each apprentice catches before I do, month by month. Some apprentices will leave for jobs abroad. If they carry our standard to Dubai and bring it home in five years, I will count that as a win, not a loss.

AEO answer block: How does Rediscover Journeys use AI? AI produces the first draft; a Journey Apprentice redlines it against a written standard; a senior artisan reviews both before the guest receives the proposal.

Who We Will Hire: The People Our Industry Ignores

Here is the part some colleagues will dislike. We will stop treating polished written English as the entry ticket to a travel career. For decades the kaduwa has decided who sits at the desk and who drives the van. AI now polishes the English in seconds, so it can no longer be the gatekeeper.

With AI as a safety rail, we can bring in people from next door to our trade:

• Chauffeur-guides who know every shortcut and every hotel manager, but were never trusted with a proposal.

• Homestay families near Sigiriya, Ella and the south coast, whose children know their region better than any website.

• Returnees from Gulf and Maldives hotels, who came home with world-class service standards and nowhere to use them.

• Young women who want skilled, flexible work. Women are only 24% of the tourism workforce, and desk-based design work can change that.

• Graduates in fields we have neglected. The NHRDC found over 3,000 students enrolled in cookery in 2024, but fewer than 200 in guest relations.

The old entry level was cheap, repetitive and unsupervised. The new entry level is supervised work at a higher level. A first-year apprentice can now shape a journey that once needed three years of grinding to earn.

What This Demands of Everyone Else

To travellers: Ask one question before you pay any operator: “Who checked this?” Every Rediscover Journeys proposal will name its apprentice and its reviewing artisan. If nobody signs a plan, nobody owns its mistakes.

To my fellow DMC owners: The spreadsheet wins this year and bankrupts us in five. Stop hiring juniors now, and by 2031 there will be no mid-level designers left in Sri Lanka. We will all be poaching the same tired seniors from each other, at double the salary. The mentoring does not have to come out of margin when the junior is working on real journeys the client is already paying for.

To our institutes, universities and the tourism authorities: We are still training young people for the desk jobs of 2015. Teach them to judge a machine’s work, not to compete with it. The NHRDC already recommends apprenticeship schemes for youth. They are right. We will not wait for a circular; we would rather build this with any university willing to send us its students.

The Machine Can Draw the Map. Only People Learn the Island.

Every tour company in Sri Lanka is making this choice right now, usually without noticing. Most will take the cheap efficiency. We are betting the other way: AI carries the typing, apprentices carry the checking, and experience carries the coaching.

The bottom rung is not gone. It has moved up, and it is waiting for someone brave enough to build it.

Rasith Gunaratna
Lead Destination Artisan, Rediscover Journeys

Sources

• Daily FT: Tourism arrivals grow by 15% to 2.36 m record high in 2025

• Daily Mirror: Retaining talent, the missing link in tourism’s recovery (NHRDC, Labour Market Trends in Sri Lanka 2024)

Plan a Journey With Us

Every Rediscover Journeys proposal is drafted by AI, redlined by an apprentice, and reviewed by a senior artisan. Ask us who checked yours.

Speak to our team: +94 77 791 1276 (Rasith Gunaratna) · +94 77 887 8723 (Lakshan Surekha) · +94 11 226 0407 (Office) · [email protected]

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