Tourists used to flock to India's party capital, Goa. Now many are heading elsewhere

Key developments are emerging from the global stage. Foreign tourists are falling out of love with Goa - here's why53 minutes ago Share Save Add as preferred on GoogleNikhil InamdarGetty ImagesGoa's overseas tourist numbers have nearly halved from their pre-Covid peak It is just past noon at the crescent-shaped Palolem beach on the southern tip of Goa's long, sandy coastline. The sun is blinding hot, but that has not deterred the tourist hordes from splashing about in the ocean. The beachside shacks and cheap backpacker hotels hugging the bay in the state often dubbed India's party capital are full with tourists.

What's different here from some years ago, though, is that the Europeans and Russians who once thronged Palolem and other beach villages of Goa are missing. The crowd is almost all local, a reflection of the diminishing appeal of this tiny coastal state among foreign tourists. The abundance of domestic visitors, on the other hand, shows that its lure has grown among people from far-flung corners of the country.

The Details

Numbers released by Goa's tourism department underscore these trends. Nearly 900,000 foreigners visited the state in 2017. By 2025, the number had fallen to around half a million.

The number of domestic tourists, on the other hand, grew from 6. 8 million in 2016 to more than 10 million last year. The state's tourism department recently said that the global geopolitical situation has been affecting overseas flows.

"We have to remain both pessimistic and optimistic while planning ahead," Rohan Khaunte, Goa's tourism minister told a local outlet. But the decline in numbers predates the recent conflict, which begs the question: why are foreign visitors, who've patronised the relaxed budget getaway since the hippie heyday of the 1960s and 1970s, now turning away? Getty ImagesMore affordable alternatives like Sri Lanka are giving tough competition to Goa's tourist economy"People are just hard up.

What Experts Say

There was Covid and then the war and now flights are so expensive because of what's happening in the Middle East - so money is definitely a factor," says Sophie, a ballet dancer from Russia who is on her fifth trip here. "Some of my friends are choosing Turkey or Egypt over Goa this year because its closer to home and cheaper. "Rico, who's been visiting for the last 20 years from Newcastle, feels the same way about European visitors.

"Certainly in my country folks at the moment have a lot less money to go overseas. For the last three-four years they've tended to take more holidays at home," he says. Some half-a-dozen foreign tourists that the spoke to also blamed longer and more cumbersome visa procedures and a hike in the five-year visa fees for the decline in visitor numbers.

Ernest Dias, who is a committee member at Goa's Department of Tourism and runs a large travel charter company, says cheaper hotels and easier on-arrival visas have prompted European and Russian visitors to look elsewhere in Asia too - Vietnam and Sri Lanka in particular.

The development has drawn wide international attention, with diplomatic circles watching closely.