Sri Lanka used this week’s Global Game Connect summit in Colombo to signal that online gaming and casino-led tourism are becoming a major part of the countries economy. The two-day event, held on March 16 and 17 at Cinnamon Life in Colombo and endorsed by the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau, brought together iGaming platforms, operators, payment providers, and compliance specialists for the country’s first major iGaming summit.
Sri Lankan officials are trying to position the country as a regional platform for gaming, technology, and higher-value tourism, especially as they look to attract more investment and pull in demand from nearby markets such as India.
Colombo used GGC to pitch Sri Lanka as a regional gaming and tech base
At the summit, Deputy Tourism Minister Ruwan Ranasinghe said the government sees Sri Lanka as a hub for technological innovation and gaming, with room to serve fast-growing neighboring markets. That matters because the conference was not framed as a one-off industry event. It was used as a public signal that the government wants a bigger role in both digital gaming and the wider business activity that comes with it.
The commercial backdrop supports that pitch. Sri Lanka is targeting 3 million tourist arrivals in 2026 after a record 2.36 million in 2025, and tourism remains one of the country’s biggest foreign-exchange earners. Officials have also set a longer-term target of 5 million arrivals by 2030.
City of Dreams has already turned the casino strategy into a live project
Sri Lanka’s land-based gaming push is no longer theoretical. City of Dreams Sri Lanka, the country’s first integrated resort, officially opened in Colombo in August 2025 as a partnership between Melco Resorts and John Keells Holdings. The project gave Sri Lanka its first large-scale casino-led resort platform and immediately tied gaming more closely to luxury travel, meetings, and entertainment.
That strategy may not stop with one property. In January, the Finance Ministry launched an expression-of-interest process for the divestiture of Canwill Holdings, the company tied to Colombo’s long-stalled Hyatt tower project, keeping open the possibility of another large tourism-linked development in the capital.
A political push for iGaming in Sri Lanka
For now, the clearest shift is political and commercial rather than regulatory. Sri Lanka has shown it wants gaming to support tourism, foreign investment, and higher-value visitor spending, while using Colombo as the center of that push.
The real test is whether the country can convert that conference message into a lasting framework for online gaming and a broader pipeline of resort and tourism investment.
