India is becoming a key source market for tourism to the US, new data from the US National Trade and Tourism Office (NTTO) shows. With a softening in US domestic leisure spending and wider East Asian tourism still down post-pandemic, a huge uptick in arrivals to the US from India is expected to continue, bolstering the US market.
Just under 1.9 million Indian tourists went to the US in only the first 10 months of 2024, beating 2019’s figures by 48%. At the same time there has been a 50% boom in business visas issued and leisure visas are also up 43.5%. A range of factors seem to be behind the surge, from increased affluence among the growing Indian middle classes to better connectivity and flight capacity – which is up 42.3% in 2024 compared with 2019, according to data from OAG Aviation.
East Asia tourism down
However, the increase in Indian visas and visitors comes against a backdrop of falling visitor numbers from elsewhere in East Asia, with China (-44.5%), Japan (-50.8%) and South Korea (-23.9%) all down. That fall is being attributed to a preference for domestic travel within the region and a rejection of long-haul destinations.
While European tourists are returning, their numbers also remain below pre-Covid-19 highs. In fact, among the US’s top eight source markets for tourism, India is the only nation now sending more visitors to Uncle Sam than before the pandemic. Even US domestic tourists are cutting back on their leisure spend. In this context then, the Indian appetite for long-haul travel is helping to counterbalance lower demand from other markets.
“Indian travellers are stepping up to fill part of the gap left by lower visitation from China, Japan and South Korea,” said Laura Lee Blake, CEO of the Asian-American Hotel Owners Association, which, according to Reuters, represents 60% of the hotels in the United States.
“Their growing interest in exploring smaller cities and secondary markets is helping to spread the recovery across a broader range of destinations,” she added, highlighting that their spend tended to be at the budget and mid-scale end, something that Hilton Asia-Pacific President Alan Watts told CNBC is “fuelling the bottom of the pyramid.”
Continued growth anticipated from India
The Indian tourism “summer” is a phenomenon also noted by Viator, a TripAdvisor travel brand, which has reported a 50% increase in US bookings by Indian clients in 2024 and says bookings are up three-fold on 2019. Likewise, Airbnb’s chief business officer says the accommodation firm has “seen over a 45 per cent increase in nights booked by Indians travelling to the US,” over the last three years.
Fellow booking platform Tripoffice.com is also anticipating “growth in occupancy rates and revenue, driven by a younger, experience-driven audience from India.” Hilton’s Watts concurs. He told Squawk Box Asia that outbound travellers from India increased from 10 million to 27.3 million in 2024 and that today’s numbers are “minuscule compared to what it’s going to be in the future.”
