When Indians plan their vacations, they rarely think beyond their borders. According to official statistics from the country’s Ministry of Tourism released in July 2023, 1.7 billion tourists visited Indian states in 2022, compared with 21 million international travelers by Indian citizens. Half of these tourists were concentrated in four states: Uttar Pradesh in the north and Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka in the south. A look at the number of international travelers suggests a similar concentration in a handful of destinations.
According to official statistics, 5.9 million Indians visited the UAE in 2022, accounting for 28% of the total number of international tourists. Other Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait also feature in the top eight countries receiving Indian tourists, with 2.4 million, 880,000 and 830,000 respectively. After countries and regions in Asia and the Arabian Peninsula, the US and the UK are also popular destinations.
It is unclear whether these trips are for leisure or other purposes, but the popularity of the Gulf countries and the United States may be partly due to the development of labor migration over the past decades. According to the latest World Migration Report of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), migration flows from India to the United Arab Emirates, the United States and Saudi Arabia rank among the top 10 in the world. For example, the United Arab Emirates was home to about 3.6 million Indians in August 2023. According to IOM, only two routes have more migrants from one country to another as of 2020: from Mexico to the United States, with about 11 million people, and from Syria to Turkey, with about 4 million people.
