Some stats on how INCREDIBLE India is losing to VIGOROUS Vietnam
It’s sad, how INCREDIBLE INDIA is failing to VIBRANT VIETNAM - staggering under its own weight, bloated with potential, yet crippled by apathy and red tape.
It’s sad, how INCREDIBLE INDIA is failing to VIGOROUS VIETNAM - staggering under its own weight, bloated with potential, yet crippled by apathy and red tape.
India’s foreign tourist arrivals peaked in 2019, with ~1.1cr arrivals, of which ~40% were expats and students returning to visit families.
Meanwhile, there is Vietnam, a lean, hungry contender, has rocketed to third-most-visited in Southeast Asia with 1.8cr international arrivals in 2024, elbowing past Singapore
It’s targeting 2.3cr arrivals in 2025, which will take it closer to Mayalsia, which clocks ~2.5cr arrivals a year and is second only to Thailand, which gets ~3.5cr foreign tourists annually
Meanwhile, India, with more people, land, and UNESCO heritage sites than all of them combined, gets a fraction of the international tourists each attracts individually.
..
Our mandarins must seriously ditch the “Incredible India” nostalgia and take notes.
Vietnam welcomed nearly 40 lakh tourists in January-February 2024 alone, a 30.2% YoY surge
India? A paltry 48 lakh for the first half of 2024, ~45% of which were Indian students and expats. And still, we were 10% shy of 2019’s 53 lakh
Worse, over 5 lakh Indians flocked to Vietnam in 2024, up by a whopping 297% from pre-pandemic levels!
What’s Vietnam’s secret?
Vietnam simplified e-visas - 90-day stays (triple the old limit)
And also announced visa-free entry for high per capita income heavyweights like France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Korea, China and Spain, with more added monthly
Plus, it’s cheaper (30% lower travel costs, Redseer, 2024) and cleaner (48% of Indians spit in public, Swachh Bharat, 2022)
It rolls out the red carpet to compete whenever someone in any part of the world decides to visit Goa, Kerala’s backwaters in India or Kutch’s white deserts.
Meanwhile, 70% of our tourism budget props campaigns like “Dekho Apna Desh,” ignoring foreigners who’ve shunned Goa’s faded charm for Da Nang’s beaches.
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It’s a shame that India has 42 UNESCO sites vs Vietnam’s 8, a diaspora of 3.5cr folks abroad, and yet we’re 54th on the WEF Travel Index while Vietnam is 32nd.
We need to slash visa hassles, flood skies with flights, brand the damn culture beyond curry, and go for growth by hiring thousands of travel influencers abroad to build the hype, like Vietnam did.
Most importantly, we need to AT LEAST build tourism-centric pockets where women literally feel safe.
We really need this!
Best,
Jayant Mundhra
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