A Visit Is Not a Visitor: A Case for Better Tourism Numbers

The Editorial Desk's Position

The Ministry of Tourism's India Tourism Data Compendium 2026, as summarised by The Policy Edge, reported 428.55 crore domestic tourist visits to states and union territories in 2025, up 45.5%, and foreign tourist arrivals of 91.49 lakh, down 8.1%. Foreign tourist visits to states rose 21.6% in the same year.

We think India's tourism statistics are good enough to show direction and not good enough to guide decisions, and that three changes would improve them.

Why the Headline Numbers Confuse

The summary itself carried the caveats. Visits and arrivals are not counts of unique people. One traveller can make several trips, and one trip can create visits in several states. "Foreign tourist visits to states" measure visits within states, not foreign travellers entering India. That is why foreign visits could rise 21.6% while arrivals fell 8.1%.

The domestic figure has a second problem. The summary said Uttar Pradesh accounted for about 68% of the national rise in domestic visits, and its count includes the 2025 Kumbh Mela, though the compendium does not isolate the event's effect. If one exceptional event accounts for most of an increase, the percentage rise is not a guide to underlying growth. Our arithmetic from the summary's numbers suggests a rise of about 134 crore visits, of which about 91 crore came from one state. Both numbers are our estimates from the published percentages.

The summary also noted that the datasets use different reference periods, from calendar 2025 for flows to 2023-24 for the share of GDP and 2024-25 for employment, and that totals should not be combined.

“If one event explains most of a rise, the percentage is not a guide to growth.”

What We Propose

1. Publish a unique-traveller estimate for domestic tourism, from household surveys or mobile and ticketing data with appropriate privacy safeguards, alongside the visit counts. 2. Publish event-adjusted series. Where a single mass gathering accounts for a large share of a state's count, show the series with and without it. 3. Align the periods and publish a single, dated table of the main indicators with their definitions. 4. Publish length of stay and spending, which matter more to operators than visits.

Why This Matters to Business & The Counter-Argument

Why this matters to business: A hotel owner reading "45.5% growth" may plan for a boom that was concentrated in one state and one event. A tourism board comparing states by visits rewards places that attract many short trips over those that attract fewer, higher-spending ones. An airline or a state government deciding on infrastructure needs to know the number of people, not the number of events.

The strongest counter-argument: Collecting unique-traveller data is expensive and hard. Travellers cross state lines, stay with relatives and travel without hotels. Visit counts from hotels, monuments and transport are administrative by-products and cost little. A household survey may be less reliable than the existing counts. There are also privacy concerns with any mobile-based method. We accept that the existing counts are useful, and that better methods have costs. We do not propose replacing them. We propose adding an estimate, even a rough one with a stated margin of error, so that users can see both.

What Would Change Our Mind, Action & A Better Series

What would change our mind: If a pilot showed that a unique-traveller estimate was too imprecise to be useful, or that its cost outweighed its value, we would withdraw the proposal for a routine series and keep the event-adjusted one.

What you can do: Treat tourism headlines as direction, not size. Ask whether the number counts people, trips or visits, and whether one event drives it. Our Practical Guide on reading government data explains the method.

A note on foreign arrivals: The April 2026 snapshot showed 5.34 lakh foreign tourist arrivals, 14.3% below April 2025 and 31% below April 2019. A decline in arrivals is a problem that a rise in state-level foreign visits does not solve. Different questions need different numbers.

How a better series would read: Imagine, for illustration only, a state report that showed three lines: total visits, visits excluding one named mass gathering, and an estimate of unique domestic travellers with a margin of error. A hotel owner could see at a glance whether the state's tourism grew on an ordinary year's footing or on an extraordinary event. A planner could see whether growth came from more people or more trips per person. None of this is exotic; statistical offices elsewhere publish similar breakdowns. What is needed is a decision to publish them, and a budget to collect the underlying data.