For more than four decades, family-owned hospitality group Jetwing has shared Sri Lanka’s unparalleled beauty with the world by booking itineraries and hosting visitors in their hotels.
Jetwing’s entrepreneurial journey – from a single 6-room hotel on a stretch of Negombo beach to the nation’s preeminent hospitality company – is more than just serendipity, however. Their devotion to their people, both those in their employ as well as their rooms, has carried Jetwing through civil strife and economic uncertainty.
Jetwing’s owning family, the Coorays, have flourished in an industry where many others have faltered by investing in their most important resource – human potential.
Now, the company’s founding family is taking steps to prepare Jetwing for the transition to the third generation by enacting a strategy to restructure the group and, by extension, individual family members’ leadership responsibilities – a concept ideated by Jetwing’s late founder Herbert Cooray.
Shiromal, an accountant by profession, took a position at the family business after a decade in finance. Her brother, Hiran, joined at their father’s behest upon graduating from his studies overseas. Their tenures at the family business, 30 and 32 years respectively, have seen Jetwing expand through some of Sri Lanka’s most tumultuous decades.
