The purpose of the study is to examine the impact of tourism on economic growth in Sri Lanka through the Autoregressive Distributed Lag(ARDL) bounds testing approach. The analysis was carried out for the period from 1969 to 2009. By and large, our analysis reveals that the tourism has a positive impact on economic growth in Sri Lanka both in the short-run and long-run. Hence, it is crucial for the Sri Lankan government to achieve unification and stability by focusing on political solutions to a sustainable long-term conflict resolution in order to attract more tourism arrivals and thereby the Sri Lanka can enhance its economic growth.