We have the culture. We have the services. What’s missing is the system.
India has 22 official languages, shifting food cultures every few kilometres, and landscapes that range from Himalayan treks and tiger sanctuaries to deserts, backwaters, beaches and year-round festivals. By any reasonable measure, it is one of the world’s most diverse tourism destinations.
Yet international travel to India is still funneled into a narrow circuit: Delhi, Agra, Rajasthan, Goa and Mumbai, often packaged through spirituality, palatial and ultra-luxury, or ‘poverty tour’ experiences. India received around 9.66 million international tourists in 2024, still 11.6% below its 2019 peak, and remains weak on repeat visitation compared with Asia’s strongest tourism markets. Repeat tourism is the clearest test of whether a destination delivers on its promise. By that measure, India is underperforming.
How We Lost the Plot
For Millennials, India meant something specific. It represented spiritual discovery, backpacker authenticity and a kind of cultural immersion that felt genuinely different from Western consumer travel. India was aspirational because it offered distance from routine, structure and material excess.
Japan now holds a similar position for Gen Z, but through a very different cultural code. Younger travellers encounter Japan through anime, design, food culture, gaming, creator itineraries, cafés, convenience-store rituals, street fashion and neighbourhood content. It feels constantly worth exploring because its culture is broken into small, specific and shareable experiences.
That is the shift India missed. The country remained associated with broad ideas like spirituality, chaos, heritage and self-discovery, while the market moved toward precise, visible and bookable experiences. Gen Z does not only want to be told that a destination is culturally rich. They want to see the exact café, market, food trail, craft workshop, festival, neighbourhood or creator route that makes the trip feel worth taking.
India’s challenge is that too much of its experiential value still sits offline, fragmented or dependent on word-of-mouth. Japan became easy to imagine as a trip. India still has to make more of itself easy to discover, trust and buy.
Image Credits: Incredible India Website
The Campaign That Should Have Solved This
The Incredible India campaign, launched in 2002 through a collaboration between the Ministry of Tourism and Ogilvy & Mather, gave India a rare, coherent tourism brand. It stitched mountains, festivals, heritage, adventure, wellness and beaches into one narrative, deliberately pushing back against the idea of India as only a land of snake charmers and the Taj Mahal. The results were visible: tourist arrivals rose 16% in the first year, foreign arrivals doubled from 2.65 million to 5.38 million within six years, and tourism forex earnings grew from $3.46 billion in 2000 to $11.74 billion by 2008.
But the campaign did not sustain that breadth. By 2004, the shift was already visible. The second phase of Incredible India was described as focusing on “spiritual India,” with yoga and ayurveda becoming the most exportable shorthand for Brand India. A campaign that began by selling India’s diversity soon handed much of its identity back to wellness and spiritual discovery, accelerating the Eat, Pray, Love-ification of Indian tourism.
At the same time, tourism spending remained concentrated on monuments and luxury infrastructure, while private experience-led operators stayed fragmented. No coordinated platform emerged to deliver the diversity the campaign had promised. So foreign tourists defaulted back to guidebook India – The Taj and the Golden Triangle, because that is still what the supply side made easiest to buy. But human, local and story led experiences, like the Sheroes Hangout, a cafe run by acid attack survivors that sits just half a mile away from Taj Mahal, are discovered only through extensive research or scrolling through Instagram.
Image credits: @tonykmontana/instagram and @jack_ofalljourneys/instagram
The Market Is Already Telling Us Something
Creators are already proving the gap. American influencer Tony Klor’s Instagram vlogs from Muzaffarpur, Bihar, showed local food, Madhubani artisans and overlooked architecture in the city to an audience that responded with genuine curiosity. Another creator, Jack Heaton, made a similar point from Kerala, noting that most international tourists never move beyond the Golden Triangle and that India needs to promote the places travellers would actually enjoy.
Both are market signals. Foreign tourists are discovering India’s deeper experiences through creators instead of official channels. The demand exists. The supply exists. What is missing is the platform that connects them at scale.
Image credits: Khaki Tours, No Footprints, Rajasthan Studio
What's Already Working
Scaling curated experiences does not require India to invent new attractions. Mumbai, Delhi, Goa, Jaipur, Udaipur, Kochi, Varanasi and several other destinations already have hotels, restaurants, transport networks and tourist footfalls. The constraints are aggregation, quality control, and distribution.
Khaki Tours shows what the model looks like in practice. Most of their Mumbai walks turn South Bombay’s colonial architecture, trade history and street-level city development into a three-hour, premium cultural product priced around ₹2,500–₹3,500 per person, with tours often selling out in advance.
And Khaki Tours is not alone. Similar operators across India are turning culture into bookable experiences. No Footprints builds Mumbai tours around dabbawalas, Jewish heritage and Koli fishing villages. Rajasthan Studio lets travellers learn directly from artisans through block printing, Pichwai painting and metal engraving workshops. India City Walks turns kite-flying in Chandni Chowk, hidden Varanasi lanes and rural walks near major cities into guided cultural products.
None of these are adventure trips or remote expeditions. They operate in and around cities tourists already visit. They simply ask travellers to look beyond the obvious.
Each operator proves the market exists. What India still lacks is a scaled layer that aggregates, verifies and distributes these experiences nationally.
Leveraging the Service Economy Frameworks
India has already shown it can turn fragmented informal services into organized, app-based markets. Given the right amount of time, tech and talent – companies like Zomato, Swiggy, Urban Company, Snabbit and Pronto have made multi-billion dollar businesses out of organizing India’s food delivery and home services markets.
Tourism experiences simply haven't been treated as a category worthy of the same approach, which is why the market still operates informally: guides work in cash, quality varies enormously, tourists encounter scams that circulate online and reinforce the worst perceptions of the country.
The gap between our experiences offerings and the tourists is that the experiences are not easy enough to find, compare, book or trust. A stronger tourism layer would mean verified guides, clear pricing, digital payments, reviews, safety checks and basic quality standards. That is how India’s cultural depth becomes a product travellers can actually buy.
The Ultimate Missing Link
The ingredients are present. The cultural assets exist. The operational know-how is proven. Creator content is already shifting international perception. Private operators have demonstrated viable unit economics in isolation. What's missing is the coordinated platform that connects India's fragmented experience supply to international demand.
The "Incredible India" campaign worked as communication and failed as a system. It told the world what India had to offer and then built no delivery mechanism for that promise. The work that hasn't been done is building the system and the window to do it on India's own terms is narrower than it appears.