Hilton Colombo is staging the 33rd edition of its annual Oktoberfest from 29 October to 7 November, a 10-day Bavarian festival run in partnership with SampathCards and Visa.
EconomyNext reported the announcement on Tuesday.
What is on
The programme features a Bavarian-themed buffet, live entertainment, games and activations across the ten days. The hotel has booked the Oompah Bavarian Band from Munich to perform, and says servers will be in traditional German attire.
Sampath cardholders get ticket discounts of up to 15%.
A 33-year run
The edition number is the most substantial fact in the announcement. At 33 years, the Hilton event predates most of Colombo’s current hotel calendar and has run through the civil war’s final decades, the 2019 Easter attacks and the 2022 economic crisis.
“Oktoberfest at Hilton Colombo is a celebration that has become part of the fabric of Colombo’s social calendar,” said Manesh Fernando, General Manager of Hilton Colombo and Area General Manager for Hilton Sri Lanka.
Darshin Pathinayake, Chief Business Intelligence Officer at Sampath Bank, framed the bank’s role in customer-value terms: “At Sampath Bank, we believe the value of a card extends beyond the transaction. It is also about the experiences, moments and opportunities it brings to our customers.”
The second Oktoberfest in Colombo this season
This is the second distinct Oktoberfest staged in the city within a month. City of Dreams ran its own Bavarian festival at The Podium over four nights from 21 October, at Rs 9,800 nett per ticket — a second edition at that venue, against Hilton’s thirty-third.
The two are separate events, by different operators, on non-overlapping dates. Their appearance in the same season is a straightforward indicator of how Colombo’s hospitality sector is competing for the year-end dining market.
A second filing this desk cannot cite
Ada Derana’s business service also carried the announcement, under the headline “The Original Oktoberfest Returns to Hilton Colombo for its 33rd Year.” That headline independently corroborates both the edition number and the “Original Oktoberfest” branding the hotel uses.
It is not cited as a source. Ada Derana’s pages — including the bizenglish subdomain — have returned CloudFront 403 errors to this desk for more than six weeks, so the filing cannot be fetched and its publication date cannot be established. Under this desk’s sourcing rule, a source whose date cannot be verified is not used.
One point is therefore left open. A search summary of that Ada Derana filing describes the partnership as being with Sampath Cards and Emirates, where EconomyNext names SampathCards and Visa. This desk could not read the Ada Derana text to check it. The EconomyNext filing’s own photograph caption names three Visa executives — the company’s Country Manager for Sri Lanka and Maldives among them — which supports Visa as the partner in the filing cited here. The discrepancy is recorded rather than resolved, and no attempt has been made to merge the two accounts.
Not reported
The filing does not give a ticket price for the Hilton event, the discounted price for Sampath cardholders, daily session times, or whether the festival runs every one of the ten days. It does not name the venue within the property, or say what the 15% discount applies to beyond “tickets.”
It gives no attendance figure for previous editions and no indication of capacity, and does not say in which year the Hilton event began.
A note on this filing: the announcement is a corporate partnership release, carried by a verified business outlet, and reads as promotional rather than reported. The event, dates and edition number are reproduced here as the organisers state them; this desk has not independently verified them.
