Foreign tourists falling out of love with Goa, numbers show
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.
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?
"People are just hard up. There was Covid and then the war [with Ukraine] 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 BBC 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.
"Today's traveller wants to make quick decisions and take last-minute trips. So this [the visa delay] is definitely a big contributing factor to the drop in numbers," Dias told the BBC.
He says a big Russian charter group recently cancelled their planned Goa trip and went to Vietnam instead where demand has "hit the roof".
Besides on-arrival visas, affordability is a key factor behind the outperformance of these countries relative to Goa.
The boom in domestic visitors as well as the MICE economy (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions) has priced out many foreign visitors from hotels with good star ratings, according to Dias.
Supply of affordable beach-front resorts is also more limited in Goa compared with Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Thailand, where one can get a package deal at half the rate, if not cheaper.
The axing of a direct London Gatwick-Goa Air India service has also had an impact.
At a shack off Benaulim Beach north of Palolem, Nicola, a hairdresser who's come for three weeks with her friends Alison and Dwayne, told the BBC she had to do an unplanned layover in Mumbai because of the axed service, which was not convenient.
She said her brother chose to go to Sri Lanka instead this year.
"It's definitely more up and coming. He thought it was more affordable and also far cleaner than Goa," she said.
Dias says the government has ramped up its effort to keep the beaches litter-free, but admits that many roads leading towards them have been defaced by garbage - "not a good view", he admits, "especially for foreign tourists who are very particular about cleanliness".
Prohibitively high taxi fares as a result of the aggressive resistance of local unions to app-based services is also another "big problem", he says.
"It's like living in the Stone Age, you cannot get a taxi on your app in Goa because the local unions will confront them."
None of this speaks well for the tourist-dependent local economy of this laid-back tropical paradise.
According to Shervyn Lobo, who runs a 100-room hotel near Goa's popular Baga beach stretch, footfall of overseas visitors has dropped at least 10% at his property. While he has been able to mitigate the impact through higher local bookings, foreigners are preferred guests in hotels like his because they stay longer and keep the rooms occupied.
They are also more likely to buy excursions, hire motorbikes and eat out at local shacks and restaurants compared with Indian visitors who often prefer to pay for a full-board vacation, says Dias - highlighting how the drop in overseas tourists is impacting the broader tourist ecosystem.
"We are now trying our best to get the foreigners back with road shows. We recently went to Poland, and Scandinavia is our next target market," he said, adding that the state is also keen to draw more non-European visitors from Asia and Africa in the years ahead.
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