We help travellers find their version of Sri Lanka

The same island is a completely different holiday depending on who is taking it. Most of what we do is working out which one you are actually after.

A traveller who wants tea terraces and a verandah, a surfer chasing the swell, someone who has come for leopards, a family doing all of it for the first time: they should not be sold the same fortnight. Sri Lanka is small enough that operators try, and the result is an itinerary that half-serves everyone and spends five days in a van.

So we start from the traveller rather than the map. Six traveller types, nine ways in, and routes built around each, including being straight with you when the month you have picked is wrong for the coast you had in mind.

What we do differently

• We publish the season, not just the highlights

  Two monsoons run here on opposite schedules. Every trip carries a twelve-month strip showing how that route reads through the year, and where a route has a seasonal twin we link the two rather than sell you the wrong one.

• We publish drive times, and refuse to guess

  We keep one registry of every transfer we use (112 of them), and a trip cannot go live while any leg on it is unconfirmed. A published drive time is a promise.

• We itemise entrance fees

  Site fees here are high and rising. Most operators bury them in the exclusions. We list every one, mark what we cover, and total both.

• We say who a trip is not for

  Every itinerary on this site carries that list. It is the field almost nobody publishes and the one that saves the most disappointed trips.