Luxury holidays to Sri Lanka: luxury hotel holidays, touring holidays and special interest holidays
Our Sri Lanka offers you luxury, tailor-made holidays and tours for individuals, staying at a personally-selected range of Sri Lankan hotels in a wide number of regions throughout the country. Our holidays throughout Sri Lanka are for single-centre beach or country stays, multi-centre stays and touring holidays. We offer a range of accommodation options from eco-lodges to luxury resorts, but often we choose boutique hotels of character that reflect the region. All our holidays and tours (with chauffeur-guide) are for individuals (not groups) travelling as singles, couples and families or a combination. Sri Lanka is a perfect destination for a varied holiday with the island not only offering natural beaches, but also an immense range of scenery, wildlife and culture. Enjoy an authentic and cultural adventure in this fascinating country, with experiences from spa treatments to walking, from bird-watching to staying in luxury safari tented camps, from visiting temples to tea plantations. With Expressions Holidays you benefit from over thirty years’ experience in constructing luxury, tailor-made holidays.
Our bespoke, luxury hotel holidays can be
● Single centre or multi-centre● Long or short stays
● Combine a variety of different hotels in different regions
● Utilise a variety of transport arrangements including scheduled flights, local flights, transfers or chauffeur-guides
Included in all our holidays
● Concierge service● Handcrafted helpful hints and local information provided with all our holidays
● Personal service by your sales consultant who looks after all aspects of your holiday
● Full financial protection with our ATOL (3076) for all holidays including a flight and our ABTOT for all non-air holidays
Call us on 01392 441245
Luxury holidays to Sri Lanka: luxury hotel holidays, touring holidays and special interest holidays
Places to stay
Our Sri Lankan selection of places to stay offers an exciting range of boutique hotels, tea-planters’ bungalows, grand hotels, eco-lodges, safari lodges and luxury resorts. Many are rich with Sri Lankan cultural heritage and many others are renowned architectural masterpieces, often designed by Geoffrey Bawa. Almost all hotels offer a choice of room types, including luxurious suites and perhaps inter-connecting rooms for families.
Single centre holidays
Sri Lanka is the perfect place to relax and enjoy a luxurious holiday with tropical sun, sea and sand, spending your days walking along long stretches of sandy beach and perhaps making the odd excursion to explore further afield. Our range of hotels along the coast would be wonderful for a relaxing week or two by the beach. Hotels in Negombo, Bentota and Galle offer the better options for shopping and dining out nearby. For those who love to stay in one place and explore cultural sites and wildlife at a leisurely pace, you could easily stay for a week or more in the Cultural Triangle, Kandy, Nuwara Eliya or Galle. The Cultural Triangle promises an abundance of history and archaeology; Kandy allows you to fully appreciate the nature and culture of this amazing country and discover cultural sites around Sri Lanka’s ancient royal capital; Nuwara Eliya gives you the opportunity to explore tea plantations and enjoy leisurely pursuits; while Galle offers an historic town and lovely coastline.
Two-centre holidays
The obvious combination in Sri Lanka is for a stay in the country and a stay on the coast. That way, depending on the areas you choose, you will experience a wide range of what Sri Lanka has to offer but without the constant travelling of a touring holiday. Almost any two centres would work together. The combination you choose will give you some subtle differences though in terms of scenery and cultural experiences. Or you can make the focus of one stay much more rural or wildlife associated.
Touring holidays
A touring holiday of Sri Lanka is at the heart of what many of our clients want to experience from this fascinating country and it is where we excel at using our personal knowledge and experience to tailor a holiday that is a perfect match for you. Stay in several different locations around Sri Lanka, allowing time to explore and relax in each. Combine a few nights on the beach with stays in the Kandy Hills, in the Cultural Triangle, on a high tea estate or in a national wildlife park, in Galle, Negombo or Colombo. It makes sense to factor in a night or two in Colombo, Negombo, Wadduwa or at the Wallawwa near the airport, at the beginning and/or end of your holiday to coincide with flight times.
Travel
The most popular and most efficient way to travel to Sri Lanka is from Heathrow to Colombo with Sri Lankan Airways. The flight time is about 11 hours and the timings are very convenient with the flight from London to Colombo leaving at about 21.00 hrs and arriving about 12.00 hrs the next day and on the return the flight leaves at about 13.00 hrs and arrives in London at about 20.00 hrs the same day. Sri Lankan offer economy and business class. If you want to travel from a UK regional airport, then Emirates offers a choice of flights, but we may have to amend the itinerary on the first and last days to accommodate the arrival and departure times.
Travel within Sri Lanka
We include private transfers with all our holidays to Sri Lanka, and a personal driver-guide with all our touring holidays. Your English-speaking driver-guide will meet you on arrival at Colombo airport, then accompany you on your touring holiday around the island, although the driver-guide is not automatically included when you are at beach stay for several nights. All our holidays are for individuals, so you travel as your own party and do not join a group. It is also possible to hire a car in Sri Lanka and can be arranged locally or in advance. A more popular option is to hire a car with driver for day trips or excursions, which again can be arranged by us in advance or by the hotel locally.
Our bespoke, luxury hotel holidays can be
● Single centre or multi-centre● Long or short stays
● Combine a variety of different hotels in different regions
● Utilise a variety of transport arrangements including scheduled flights, local flights, transfers or chauffeur-guides
Included in all our holidays
● Concierge service● Handcrafted helpful hints and local information provided with all our holidays
● Personal service by your sales consultant who looks after all aspects of your holiday
● Full financial protection with our ATOL (3076) for all holidays including a flight and our ABTOT for all non-air holidays
Call us on 01392 441245
Luxury holidays to Sri Lanka: luxury hotel holidays, touring holidays and special interest holidays
Regions of Sri Lanka
Roughly only half the size of England yet packed with a whole continent’s worth of temples and ruins, wildlife reserves and luxury beach resorts, Sri Lanka is a beautiful, bite-sized slice of paradise offering a whole world of diverse escapes. Littered with elegant colonial hotels and enchanting boutique lodges, Sri Lanka also offers luxury at a relative snip. Young or old, family or couple, beach-bound or culture-vulture – a visit to Sri Lanka satisfies everyone. Formerly an Arab trading port, the commercial capital Colombo is a bustling, colourful town, with a fabulous bazaar, colonial churches and craft markets. To the north of Colombo lies Negombo and the beaches of the west coast, whilst to the south Wadduwa is the start of a string of fabulous beaches running all the way down and around Sri Lanka’s southwest coast, with a collection of intimate, exquisite beach resorts. Further southward lies historic Galle, a reminder of the Dutch presence on the island. Inviting as Sri Lanka’s coastline is, however, the island’s interior is worth the airfare alone, with forest parks sheltering leopards and wild Asian elephants, a verdant hill country carpeted in tea plantations with lovely boutique planter’s house hotels, and what no visitor to Sri Lanka should be allowed to miss, the Cultural Triangle, a small area boasting five UNESCO World Heritage Sites in an area no bigger than Kent. New to tourism is the north and north east of Sri Lanka, strewn with Hindu temples, colonial gems and long white beaches offering spectacular snorkelling.
Capital
Colombo
Airports
Colombo Sri Jayawardenapura-Kotte
Currency
Sri Lankan Rupee
Size
430 km north to south, 225 km east to west
Population
21 million
Average temperature
The climate is tropical and with an average temperature of about 27C but with regional variations in terms of temperature and rainfall. The south-west has its monsoon season from May to July with intermittent rain and the north-east has its monsoon season from December to March. Seas are rougher in the area with the monsoon. In Tea Country, it is cooler but each valley can have a micro-climate
Unmissable holiday experiences in Sri Lanka
Cricket is a national sport, played on every dusty maidan and patch of grass from Jaffna to Galle; a real highlight of any trip to the south is Galle Fort, where you can wander round the ancient ramparts at sunset, watching cricket games below, or stroll the narrow streets in search of antiques in tiny, friendly shops; local festivals such as Vesak full moon in May and Poson full moon in July, as well as the famous Esala Festival in Kandy in July and August, when Buddha’s tooth is taken out from the temple and paraded through the streets; visiting national parks, sheltering an abundance of wildlife including leopards, elephants, bears and hundreds of species of birds; buying tea, gems, jewellery, spices; fantastic spicy local cuisine, specialising in fish dishes, and delicious ‘egg hoppers’; tea-tasting in the hill country; Sigirya Rock Fortress; the Cave temples of Dambulla; the medieval capital and ruins of Polonnaruwa; the sacred city of Anuradhapura; the west coast beaches flanked by palm trees, including Negombo, Beruwela, Bentota and Galle; the elephant orphanage at Pinnawela; the tea plantations near Nuwara Eliya, a region known locally as Little England; Ayurvedic massage; a warm welcome wherever you go.