Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Ceylon Tea Trails, the hotel that led to Resplendent Ceylon Courtesy of Resplendent Ceylon Entrepreneur Malik Fernando likes to begin interviews by calling himself an accidental hotelier. He was originally the “mah” in Dilmah tea, the Sri Lankan brand that’s one of the biggest tea purveyors in the world. When his father, Merrill, founded the company in the 1980s, he named it for Malik and his brother, Dilhan.
Malik always knew he would be involved in the tea business, and indeed he was and still is. The tourism thing was inadvertent, but it stuck. Now he’s the managing director of Dilmah’s hospitality arm, called Resplendent Ceylon —and one of the main architects of luxury tourism in Sri Lanka.
“I first connected with leisure when I was looking after the tea plantations for Dilmah,” he recalls, speaking of his oversight trips to the country’s magnificent central highlands. “For me, that really was the highlight in terms of the whole, how it makes you feel and the climate and all of that.” He continues, “To be honest, I knew nothing about the topic, except I knew what it was like to have a lovely experience at properties around the world.
So it was a bit of a segue.” In 2001, a ceasefire in Sri Lanka’s civil war opened the door to tourism. People all over the world knew of the Sri Lankan highlands because of Dilmah—at least those who opened the leaflet in the tea package and saw the letter from .