IndiaThe opportunity
Every tourist board we speak to has India on the list. Very few have it on the calendar.
That gap is the entire opportunity. Indians have taken over thirty five million international trips in 2025. Not by 2030 — in 2025! The boards who arrive in 2029 will be bidding against fifteen others for the same creators, the same search terms and the same shelf space in the same travel agency and they will pay considerably more for all of it.
The numbers01
International trips taken in 2025, with close to 40 million projected for 2026 — the world's fastest-growing source market for outbound travel.
Of Indians are under 35, with 500 million-plus middle-class consumers expected by 2030
Long-haul spend per person per trip. High-end independent travellers and honeymooners routinely exceed USD 5,000.
Internet users — the second-largest online population on earth. More than 90% of Indian travellers research a destination online before choosing it.
The misunderstanding 02
This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the category, and it shows up in the media plan: destinations pitch India on price, win the wrong traveller, and conclude the market does not work.
The Indian traveller is not looking for the cheapest holiday. They are looking for the one that feels most worth the money — which is a different instruction entirely. Flights take around 30% of the budget. Hotels, mostly three and four star, take 20%. And shopping takes 20% more — as much as the bed they sleep in.
What the media plan assumes
Price-led positioning, discount-led media, and a traveller who was never going to spend anyway.
What the traveller is looking for
A different instruction entirely. They will pay for the bucket-list experience — the safari, the skydive, the stargazing — and expect personalisation and genuine service in return.
Share of total trip spend.
Deliver it and they will write the review unprompted. Get it wrong and they will write that one too.
The journey03
Trip planning in India happens on a phone, in fragments, across a lunch break and a traffic jam.
Search behaviour in this market is not a proxy for travel intent — it is travel intent. Which has a blunt implication for most destination websites: a beautiful English-language page ending in a contact form is a dead end. The journey has to finish where Indian travellers actually finish it.
The geography04
Fourteen cities account for 21.8 million middle and upper-middle-class families. A metro-only plan buys the most expensive impressions in the country and misses the part that is actually growing.
The obvious three
The largest, and the most contested. Everyone's first slide.
Where the growth is
Airport infrastructure has improved, incomes have risen, and nobody has bothered to market to them yet.
It is also not one language. An English-only creator strategy reaches the top of the market and stops. To reach the rest of the country you need to work with the creators who speak Hindi, Tamil and Bengali.
Why us05
That is not a tax arrangement, it is the whole proposition. We are not a Western agency with an India slide in the deck, and we are not an Indian agency that has never run a campaign for a International tourist board.
We have spent ten years doing destination marketing for national tourist boards across Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific, Europe and South America — and we do it from India.
We know what a board's procurement process looks like, and we know what a Tier-2 creator charges. Very few agencies know both.
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