India expected to witness 13.34 million inbound tourists by 2024: Visa – PATA Destination Forecast

Global digital payments leader Visa joined hands with the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) for the Asia Pacific Destination Forecasts 2022-2024: India report and highlighted key travel trends, observations, and forecasts for the industry and country specifically. As per the findings of the report, Asia is projected to remain the dominant source region over the forecast period, while Europe and the Americas, the second and third major suppliers of visitor numbers into India, are projected to have visitor share contractions. India is expected to witness 13.34 million inbound visitors by 2024, which is around 22.1 higher than that of the pre-pandemic year 2019. That year, India received 10.93 million inbound tourists. Tourists travelling to India are forecasted to increase year-on-year between 2022 and 2024. To start with 4.1 million in 2022, which would double in 2023 to 8.5 million and 13.34 million in 2024. Over the last two years, inbound tourism not just globally but in India as well suffered badly, and numbers came down drastically. Due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of international visitors to India reduced dramatically to 2.74 million in 2020, a 74.9 per cent drop in comparison to the previous year mainly due to stringent border control measures, lockdown, and other pandemic-related restrictions. In absence of scheduled international commercial flights, the demand also dropped considerably and connectivity to India took a huge hit. The share of India in international tourist arrivals in 2020 was 1.57 per cent and the country accounted for 10.67 per cent of international tourist arrivals in the Asia Pacific region in 2020.