News of the Wayanad landslides in July affected arrivals in Kerala for months. I was in Chettinad, Tamil Nadu, for a delightful cultural festival in late September. Of the nearly 150 visitors, excluding a large Sri Lankan extended family, there were just eight foreigners.
Foreign faces were few and far between as we visited the beautiful mansions that seemed assembled for a retrospective Architectural Digest photoshoot with styles ranging from Art Deco to Art Nouveau.
The paradox is that wealthy Indians are succumbing to wanderlust while fewer foreign tourists are showing up at Indian airports than before. A recent report in Mint showed that tourist arrivals in 2024 are unlikely to cross 10 million, which is below the pre-pandemic peak of 10.9 million.
By contrast, with the peak season still ahead, Vietnam received 14.4 million foreign tourists in the first 10 months of the year.
There is a ‘best of times, the worst of times’ aspect to the travel industry in India. India’s outbound tourism market is expected to reach $19 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit about $55 billion in a decade, according to a Ficci-Nangia research paper.
Domestic travel is surging, meanwhile, creating problems of its own for inbound travel companies seeking to get luxury hotel rooms. “Hotels in Rajasthan are focusing on (Indian) weddings, so getting rooms has become a challenge,” says Sejoe Jose, who chairs the Indian Association of Tour Operators for the southern region.
Hotels in Kerala, he reports, tend to be much smaller and so fill up faster. Highway infrastructure has lagged, so the drive between Kochi and Allapuzha takes twice as long as it used to. I enjoyed a childhood of idyllic visits to sights in Rajasthan as I went to boarding school there, and to Kottayam in my summer holidays, where I would visit my paternal grandmother.
Today, I visit both infrequently. In the case of Rajasthan, I enjoy it only in summer, when it has fewer tourists—but 40° Celsius temperatures. And despite having a favourite aunt in Kottayam, the long traffic-clogged drives from Kochi airport have been making me opt for Sri Lanka over Kerala.
Today’s well-off travellers are often cash-rich and time-poor. “If you are planning a one-week trip, you want an easy in and out. We are not always an easy destination,” says Priya Paul, chairperson of Apeejay Surrendra Park Hotels. It starts with visas, with India offering neither visas on arrival nor visa-free entry for even visitors from G 20 countries.
By contrast, Thailand, which is closing in on its pre-pandemic arrivals peak of 39 million in 2019 and aims to surpass that next year, increased visa-free access to as many as 93 countries in July as it seeks to make up for its drop in Chinese arrivals.
Vietnam keeps increasing the number of countries whose citizens can travel there without a visa, a list which includes the Philippines and Cambodia. In comparison to both these popular Southeast Asian destinations, India’s better hotels look expensive partly because of a hefty 18% goods and services tax on luxury hotel bills.
Pollution in north India after Diwali has made for unflattering headlines, globally. Questions on the safety of women travellers also come up time and again, a concern that also explains low labour force participation rates for women in India.
At a personal level, my life appears to mirror this odd dichotomy of fewer foreign visitors even as more Indians travel overseas. When I lived in London in the 2000s, editing the travel, food and drink pages of the Financial Times, during summer I was scarcely able to keep up with laundering bedsheets for the guest room, given a constant flow of friends who came to stay.
In Bengaluru, the world’s back office and home to multiple global capability centres, I have had only one foreign guest stay in five years and she was on a business trip.
I happened to return from Sydney on Sunday: the non-stop Qantas flight to Bengaluru was almost entirely filled with Indian diaspora living in Australia or Indian tourists visiting that tourist-friendly country (where the welcome for visitors includes Mandarin-speaking airport staff).
On Thursday, India’s tourism ministry released data for 2023 showing that foreign tourist arrivals were 9.5 million, while NRI/diaspora arrivals were 9.4 million. The total was surpassed by outbound domestic travellers from India, at 27.8 million, a figure that may have shot up. This winter, Indians are headed for the Alps in Europe in large numbers.
Overseas, in yet another reflection of our K-shaped economy, I can report from visits to Sydney and Auckland that most Uber drivers in these cities are immigrants from India, who came as students of business administration, hotel management or vocational courses.
Listening to their tales of dreams crushed at home and abroad is saddening, but admirably, they make for a friendly welcome committee.
#Indias #drought #foreign #tourist #arrivals #sight
