Intrepid expects SL’s adventure tourism market to rebound to pre-pandemic levels this year

By Nishel Fernando
Australian-based Intrepid Travel, the world’s largest adventure travel company, expects Sri Lanka’s adventure tourism market to rebound to pre-pandemic levels this year.

“Due to the challenges last year, Sri Lanka has not recovered as fast as some of the other destinations. But we noticed more travellers coming back to Sri Lanka. Accordingly, we have increased the number of trips to 12, with different trip styles. We are confident that the Sri Lankan market will rover in the second half of the year,” Intrepid CEO James Thornton said.

Intrepid is targeting to facilitate 5,000 adventure travellers to Sri Lanka this year, up from 3,500 travellers recorded in 2019, prior to the pandemic. 

Due to connectivity, he noted that Australia along with the United Kingdom remains key source markets for Sri Lanka on the Intrepid platform, followed by the United States.

Thornton highlighted that Sri Lanka has a huge potential in terms of adventure tourism, due to its diverse offering.
“I think Sri Lanka’s potential is huge when it comes to adventure tourism. When it comes to the destination, there are great itineraries in terms of one week or 10 days or 14 days. You got mountains, beautiful beaches, you got great iconic cultural sites, fantastic food as well as people. Those are any of the things that an adventure traveller looks for in a great adventure travel destination,” he added.

He was also optimistic of Sri Lanka becoming one of Intrepid Travel’s top 20 destinations among the 120 destinations it operates in a short span of time.

Further, he emphasised that sustainability remains the core aspect of Intrepid travel experience by maximising the value creations for local stakeholders and communities. 

“Sustainability is an incredibly important part of the Intrepid travel experience. That’s why we use local providers as much as possible by staying in locally-owned hotels, predominately using local transport and we want to serve authentic Sri Lankan food. That’s what sustainability means for us. We want to make sure that money gets in the hands of local people and local companies,” he elaborated. 

Currently, Australia, the UK and United States are the primary source markets for Intrepid, while New Zealand, Europe and Canada remain as secondary source markets. Moving forward, Thornton noted that Intrepid is looking at developing Asian countries such as India and China as source markets for adventure tourism.

“We are looking at possibility of India, China at the moment and perhaps Sri Lanka in the course of time,” he added.