Why The World’s Top Travel Brands Are Betting Big On Indian Tourists

24.03.2024 - 10:23 / forbes.com / Brian Quinn / Airlines

Last week, hundreds of global travel professionals gathered in Delhi for the inaugural Skift India Summit and the opportunity to glean valuable insights from the CEOs of major travel brands, including The Oberoi Group, OYO, Agoda and the country’s flag carrier, Air India. “India is having a moment,” explains Brian Quinn, head of event programming at Skift, “with the India outbound traveler poised to become the biggest global force in coming years.”

A decade ago, you could have said the same about Chinese tourists. Back in 2014, some 117 million Chinese tourists traveled internationally, which was a 20% increase from the previous year. But 10 years and one pandemic later, Chinese outbound travel still hasn’t rebounded to its pre-Covid heights, while the energy and focus of the global tourism machine has shifted southeast—to India.

With more than 1.4 billion people, India now has the world’s largest population and the fifth-largest economy. Outbound travel from India is growing much faster than from any other country, which has led to a flurry of predictions that have travel brands salivating.

“There’s such huge potential,” says Caroline Bremner, head of travel and tourism research at Euromonitor International, which projects 47 million Indian outbound travelers by 2030. “That’s more than doubling from 2019. And then on the spending side, it’s even better, going from $35 billion in 2019 to $84 billion in 2030,” she says. “Essentially, India is jumping up the ranks and will be the sixth-largest outbound source market globally by 2030, after China, the U.S., the U.K., Germany and France.”

A 2023 report by Nangia Andersen, the Indian arm of Andersen Global, forecasts that Indian outbound travel will grow at an 11.2% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between now and 2032—which roughly aligns with Euromonitor’s prediction for tourist volume. If these projections bear out, then another, wilder prediction may not be so implausible after all: organizers of the Arabian Travel Market (ATM), an industry conference to be held in Dubai in May, have touted that India’s outbound market will be worth $144 billion a year by the end of this decade.

And a recent report from McKinsey is similarly bullish on the longer-term prospects for Indian tourism. “India’s outbound travel has the potential to grow from 13 million trips in 2022 to over 80 million in 2040,” the authors write. “If India follows China’s outbound travel trajectory (which it could, due to similarity in population size and per capita income trajectory), then Indian tourists could make 80 million to 90 million trips a year by 2040.”

Given all the hype, travel brands have, naturally, begun heavily courting Indian tourists, often by tapping celebrities as