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India’s tourism boom looks a little different when you follow the money. Spending on trips within the country has surged well beyond pre-pandemic levels, with Indian travellers powering much of the industry’s growth. But overseas visitor spending has struggled to keep up: in 2025, it was barely above its 2019 level after adjusting for inflation.
The contrast runs through the World Travel and Tourism Council’s 2026 India report which shows that domestic visitor spending reached Rs 17.7 lakh crore in 2025, up 36.9% from 2019. International visitor spending was about Rs 2.9 lakh crore, just 0.3% higher. Both comparisons use constant 2025 prices and exchange rates.
The gap widened last year when domestic spending grew 10.3%, while international spending fell 8%. That fall followed an earlier recovery. According to WTTC data, international spending was at about Rs 3.12 lakh crore in 2024, at 2025 prices.
This leaves India with a tourism industry that is growing strongly overall, but drawing much of its momentum from home. Domestic visitors accounted for 86% of spending in 2025. WTTC estimates that the sector contributed about Rs 23 lakh crore to the economy and supported 4.6 crore jobs, including its wider economic effects.
For businesses sustained by Indian travellers, that is a substantial achievement. It also makes the weaker overseas performance easier to overlook. The question is how India can turn its growing tourism capacity into more business from international visitors.
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Spreading tourist demand
The government is signalling a change in emphasis. “We don’t really need more domestic tourism. We need distributed demand,” Tourism Secretary Bhuvnesh Kumar said at the ICC Global Business Summit in New Delhi on September 19.
Kumar said Dekho Apna Desh 2.0 was being designed to direct travellers towards less-visited destinations, citing places such as Turtuk in Ladakh and Gurez in Jammu and Kashmir. The aim is to spread the benefits of existing demand while easing pressure on established hotspots.
For the overseas market, the related challenge is to turn a wider choice of destinations into trips that international travellers want to book.
Overseas earnings lag
WTTC’s Global Trends Report puts worldwide international visitor spending at about $2 trillion in 2025, above its pre-pandemic peak for the first time. It estimates that international overnight arrivals reached 1.54 billion, with China, France and Japan together accounting for nearly 30% of the year’s increase.
Official earnings figures also show a setback. In an August 6 reply to the Rajya Sabha, Tourism Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat put foreign exchange earnings from tourism at Rs 2,76,831 crore in 2025, against Rs 2,93,033 crore in 2024, a decline of about 5.5%, calculated from the ministry’s figures.
These government earnings estimates differ from WTTC’s spending measure, so the two should be read separately. However, both point to a weaker 2025 for overseas receipts. The parliamentary reply recorded over 2.02 crore international tourist arrivals in 2025, down from 2.05 crore in 2024. That broader count includes non-resident Indians as well as foreign tourists. It should not be confused with foreign tourist arrivals alone.
What arrivals reveal
The decline also needs a closer look before it is presented as evidence that foreign travellers are broadly losing interest in India. India’s foreign tourist arrivals fell 9.4% in 2025. But exclude Bangladesh, and that decline turns into growth of 4.3%, calculations from the Ministry of Tourism’s earlier, provisional Annual Tourism Snapshot for 2025 showed.
Arrivals from Bangladesh dropped 73.4%, from about 17.5 lakh to 466,012. That meant roughly 12.8 lakh fewer arrivals—more than the net decline across all markets. Growth elsewhere cushioned the fall but could not offset it.
This changes how the slowdown should be read. The overall fall was driven by the loss of a single major source market, while arrivals from the rest of the world grew in aggregate. The headline decline alone is therefore not evidence of a broad retreat from India.
The longer-term spending gap raises a wider question about how much business India is attracting from the rest of the world. The arrivals figures cannot establish how much each market contributed to the decline in earnings.
There are signs of improvement in 2026, although they remain modest. The ministry’s Monthly Tourism Snapshot reports 5.84 lakh foreign tourist arrivals in June, up 3.3% from June 2025. One month’s increase is encouraging, but cannot establish a sustained recovery in either arrivals or spending.
The same report offers a useful reminder that overseas visitors are not a single market. In June, the Indian diaspora category accounted for 37.9% of foreign arrivals, leisure for 27.3%, business for 13.7% and medical travel for 8.1%. These are monthly shares, not a profile of the entire year.
The distinction matters commercially as someone visiting family, attending a conference or seeking treatment may have very different accommodation, transport and leisure needs. More arrivals will not necessarily produce the same increase in spending across hotels, restaurants, guides and attractions. A stronger strategy needs to understand those differences.
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Improving the experience
India’s own assessment of its destinations points to some of the work required. The Ministry of Tourism’s draft State Tourism Performance Framework 2025 identifies gaps in local transport connections, visitor services, digital readiness and institutional capacity. It notes that mobility constraints can make tourist movement difficult even in states with considerable tourism potential.
The framework is a baseline assessment, not proof that any particular weakness caused the spending decline. But it directs attention to the everyday experience of a trip like reaching an attraction, finding dependable services and moving between destinations without unnecessary difficulty.
Kumar made a similar point at the summit, saying the industry needed to offer “tourism experiences which are at par with the best in the world”.
For an overseas traveller, the holiday begins well before arrival. Flights, accommodation, local transport and activities all need to fit together at a price that feels worthwhile.
“We are moving from destination to experience and I am talking about the end-to-end experience. It is not only about the Taj Mahal or Jaipur or Agra today,” said Harvinder Singh, Director, India Knowledge Center and Head, Middle East and India, United Airlines, at the same session.
Growing capital investment in the sector
Investment is also growing with WTTC’s Global Trends Report estimating capital investment in India’s travel and tourism sector at about $50 billion in 2025, up 15.1%. It points to destination development, regional air connectivity and expanded e-visa access as support for the sector.
The government is also trying to make travel easier to organise. In his August parliamentary reply, Shekhawat said the Incredible India Digital Platform provides multilingual information, curated itineraries and links to booking services for flights, hotels, cabs, buses and Archaeological Survey of India monument tickets through partner platforms.
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Kumar said the ministry had also identified around 23,000 tourism products and experiences for potential integration with the Open Network for Digital Commerce, following a pilot in Varanasi. Identification is a first step; it does not mean all those experiences are already available to book.
“The real estate on the digital platform is equally important as it is on the ground,” Singh said, underlining the need for emerging destinations to be visible online.
The value of these initiatives will depend on whether discovery leads to completed bookings, satisfactory trips and spending that reaches local businesses. The parliamentary reply describes the measures, but does not quantify the additional visitor expenditure each has generated.
India’s home market has given tourism a strong foundation. The next challenge is to ensure that expanding hotels, transport links and destination facilities also translate into a more compelling offer overseas. Until that happens, a thriving domestic business can coexist with international earnings that have made surprisingly little progress against 2019.
TOPICSIndian Economytourismtourism sectorTravel & TourismThis article was first uploaded on September twenty-three, twenty twenty-six, at fifty-four minutes past one in the afternoon. © IE Online Media Services (P) Ltd