The Top Destinations of Indian Tourists

When Indians plan their vacation, they rarely look past national borders. Official figures from the country's Ministry of Tourism released in July 2023 show that, compared to 21 million international departures by inhabitants of the South Asian nation, 1.7 billion domestic tourist visits to Indian states took place in 2022. Four states are responsible for half of these visits: Uttar Pradesh in the north, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka in the south. When looking at outbound tourism, there seems to be a similar concentration on a handful of destinations.

According to official numbers, 5.9 million Indians visited the United Arab Emirates in 2022, a 28 percent share of total outbound tourist travel. Other Gulf states like Saudia Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait are also present in the top 8 destinations for tourists from India, with 2.4 million, 880,000 and 830,000, respectively. Next to countries and regions in Asia and the Arabian Peninsula, the United States and the United Kingdom also appear as popular travel destinations.

While it's unclear whether these trips are taken for leisure or other purposes, the popularity of Gulf states and the U.S. might, in part, be attributable to developments in work migration over the last decades. The current issue of the International Organization for Migration's (IOM) World Migration Report states that migration flows from India to the United Arab Emirates, the United States and Saudi Arabia rank among the top ten worldwide. The Emirates, for example, were home to around 3.6 million Indians in August 2023. Only via two corridors have more people transferred from one country to another as of 2020 according to the IOM: Mexico to the United States with around 11 million and Syria to Turkey with approximately 4 million.