Indian tourists are booming and are a boon to compensate for the Chinese disaffection. Visas, Indian cuisine, diplomacy, collaboration with Bollywood… To attract them, you have to play several cards.
Indians have been on the move for the past few years. In 2019, the country recorded 27 million international departures, and that number is expected to rise further this year and peak at 90 million by 2040. Indian airlines are expanding their networks to meet the growing demand. While many travellers are travelling for business or to visit friends and family, around 40% are purely leisure travellers, and these tourists have deep pockets.
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Tourist offices, hotels and restaurants around the world, particularly in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, are competing to attract them. Rolling out the red carpet for them is all the more necessary as China’s tourism expansion has slowed, with only 87 million trips last year, 40% fewer than before Covid and the giant’s withdrawal into itself.
Collaborating with Bollywood
How to attract these travelers? First, they must be able to get where they want more easily. The “weakness” of the Indian passport has so far only allowed travel to the few countries that do not require a visa. Things are changing, but many Western countries maintain a costly visa policy.
A ten-year tourist visa, for example, costs £1,000 in the UK, seven times more than in the US. But to travel to America, Indians have to wait more than a year to get an appointment at consulates. As for countries on the European continent, they only issue visas after endless administrative procedures and they are often only valid for… four days.
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For states that have facilitated these procedures, collaborating with Bollywood can be a good option to attract Indian tourists. This is the case of Spain: its tourism office worked with the directors of the film Life will not be fulfilled again[…]
- challenges.fr
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