India’s tourism industry is booming at home. But Suman Billa, additional secretary at India’s Ministry of Tourism, believes that domestic success is masking a problem of India losing ground in inbound tourism.
The risk is that India becomes too comfortable relying on its vast domestic market. “It’s very easy to fall into smugness and think that our domestic market is strong, we do not need international. But that is something that we will do at our own peril,” Billa said at the annual convention of the Indian Association of Tour Operators (IATO) in Vizag.
Billa pointed to the widening gap between inbound and outbound travel, arguing that India is effectively a net foreign-exchange loser from tourism, with more money leaving the country through outbound travel than international visitors bring in. “The growth rate of outbound is 4.8%, which is much higher than inbound today,” he said.
The weakness in international tourism sits alongside an
