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The Sri Lankan government recently announced that the country will open up for tourism from August 2020, amidst the global pandemic. Sri Lanka has outpaced regional growth in tourism with an increase of 10 per cent in 2018, while in 2019, the Lonely Planet named it as the No 1 tourist destination in the world. However, its tourism industry couldn’t capitalise on these positive developments first due to a terror attack and now due to the pandemic. To find out more about the impact on the industry, health challenges and opportunities in medical tourism, we speak to Dr D A C Suranga Silva, Professor in Tourism Economics at the Department of Economics, Faculty of Arts, University of Colombo. He holds PhD from Virije University Amsterdam in Tourism Economics and M Phil in Environmental Economics from  Maastricht School of Management (MSM), the Netherlands.