Ruchini Chamindi Siriwardhana has bagged Young Executives of the Year Award

Ruchini Chamindi Siriwardhana has bagged Young Executives of the Year Award

• January 04, 2022

With over 15 years of experience in consulting tours, visas and ticketing in the tourism arena, I even started my professional life as a trainer at our national airline Carrier Sri Lankan airlines - Flyies Mies, frequent flyer partner programme. My first step to the Professional world was once I joined Classic Travels as a Travel Assistant. 

The Travel and Tourism sector was not new to me. Since I was young, I observed my father as the proprietor of Gamunu Travels building a simple tour business into a large travel and tourism organisation from the scratch. I watched him build Gamunu Travels into one of the largest organisations in the country specialising in Buddhist and Catholic Pilgrimage tours to Asian countries as well as Middle East and Europe. When it was time for me to make the decision to respond to the invitation from my father to join Gamunu Travels, I gladly accepted the offer knowing that with the skills, Knowledge and experience that I have accumulated over the years, I would be able to bring Gamunu Travels to the next Level.

Since I joined Gamunu Travels as the head of Ticketing and VISA I always pointed out that we give our main attention to outbound tours and less attention to inbound tours. As a result of that we are missing out on a great opportunity in the inbound sector. With the encouragement from my father, I started GT Leisure with my Husband as a separate company apart from Gamunu Travels mainly focusing inbound tours. I took over the position of consultant tours, Ticketing and VISA for the both companies. 

With the background form Gamunu Travels, we are highly targeted to cater the Buddhist Pilgrimage tour sector in Sri Lanka. Even though the competition was very high, we quickly became one of the renowned companies in the Pilgrimage tour sector in Sri Lanka. With dedication and hard work, it didn’t take much time for us to become the number one choice among travel agents from Vietnam for Buddhist Pilgrimage tours in Sri Lanka. That name and recommendation helped us to expand our market to Malaysia, Burma, Thailand, and even Indian. And we scaled up from a company with few tours per year to hundreds of tours per year. Diversifying from Buddhist Pilgrimage tours to Catholic Pilgrimage tours and Hindu Pilgrimage tours and from Inbound tours to Outbound tours.  

My education and professional qualifications. 

I Started my primary education in Seventh Day Advertise School-Kandana and my secondary education at De Mazenod College Kandana. I finished school as an outstanding student both in my studies and my sports and extracurricular in the school. Gathering many more memories and experiences for my future life. I started my professional education, targeting the travel and tourism field. I started to follow Foundation & EBT Level at International Airline Ticketing Academy – IATA (Montreal, Canada) soon followed by Consultant and Management at International Airline Ticketing Academy , becoming a member of  United Federation Of Travel Agents' Associations - UFTAA. In the meantime I have acquired the membership of Academy of Tourism and foreign Languages (NVQ5). I started reading for my MBA in Hospitality Management at Asia E-University in 2020. Developing interpersonal skills and proper communication skills are key to the success of this path. Successful completion of telephone ethics training programs conducted by Sri Lankan Airlines enabled me to further develop my communication skills.

My passion, Ambition and Values

My ambition is to fellow the choice and interests that I would be in my life. It also gives the meaning and purpose of my life. It helped me to streamline my knowledge and skills to become an expert in my field. My long-term goals involve growing with my company where I can continue to learn, take on additional responsibilities, and contribute as much value as possible to my company. I love that our company emphasizes professional development opportunities. I would take full advantage of the educational resources available in my life to make our company reach the highest position.

When I do things, I am excited about it, I love things that I am doing. I automatically realize my passions and ambitions. I am dreaming big. When I do things wholeheartedly with persistence, it self-motivates me and automatically finds my passions and ambitions. As I successfully change in my values, so do my personal values. This is why keeping in touch with my values is a lifelong exercise. I continuously revisit this, especially if I start to feel unbalanced... and I can't quite figure out why. I started to look back on my life – to identify when I felt really good, and really confident then I am making good choices. Thank you for this award.

I am truly honored to receive it. Thank you to the Awards Committee of “Women Icon powered by Times Women” for selecting me for the title of “Young Executive of the Year” under the category of: Women Icon Awards of Super Boss Award. It is a great honour. It is an even greater honor to be placed in such dignified ranks as those of the past honourees when the Awards Committee of “Women Icon powered by Times Women” decided to award me with “Outstanding Entrepreneur Award” under the category of “Woman Entrepreneur of the year in Service Business”.

The corporate world is full of brave people. Therefore, many industries tend to identify the best in their team annually. However when that recognition is received from an outside party, the value of that award greatly increases. When that outside party becomes such a well-known and well-recognized institute such as “Women Icon powered by Times Women”, that award becomes priceless. For those who have touched my life in any way since I started this path and my business, I am truly grateful for all you have done. My family, my friends and all my teachers, especially my team, I couldn’t have touched the sky without you all holding the ladder.

End Note 

I would like to give a message to youngsters who look up to be an Icon one day, never give up on what you really want to do. The big dreamer is more powerful than the one who has all the facts. Luck is great, but most of life is hard work. Perhaps the only way to get rid of stress is through it; Face the struggle to overcome life’s challenges. Too often we struggle to teach a lesson. We can learn from that lesson, or we can reject it.