Representative ImageElaborating on ‘Emerging insights on India’s travel landscape, Shaurab Kapadia, Vertical Head - Travel, FoodTech & India Exports, Google shared his insights during ITB India 2025. He talked about 2.4 billion reasons for anybody in the business to be happy. This was from a World Bank Deloitte Report, which states that by 2040 travellers across the world would be taking 2.4 billion trips.
The intent to travel continues to grow
He added: “We've seen the interest for travel grow at tremendous pace, almost 35% YOY in 2024 and, you know, stabilising in double digits on a very high base even today. In fact, if I have to give you a number, in India today, we see 7 billion travel related queries on an annual basis. We conducted a survey across seven APAC regions, with a sample size of about 7000, excluding China. Seven relevant APAC regions, similar to what India is from a SE Asia perspective.
And we found that the interest around travel increased, on queries like...how many times would you like to travel? Would you like to travel a lot more? The response went up to 79% which was a 6% growth year-over-year. All these positive indicators for the business that the world wants to travel. If you look at it, since 1975 the travel demand has been doubling every 15 years.
Why do people want to travel?
And think about the rising disposal income, more aspiration for travel, better life expectancy, and a very different thing that happened in last 10 years. We have a multi-generational approach to travel. In the same house, you've got a millennial, you've got a Gen Z, you've got family that want to travel together. You've got your senior citizens that want to take a vacation. So actually, the number of travellers in your house has gone up as much as the aspiration.
APAC is going to be at the centre of this growth.
A survey from Euromonitor says that by 2028 we would have added 55 million more people to this cohort, which makes the cohort of aspiring traveller to a seasoned tourist.
There will be 55 million more people with a higher disposable income, etc, but a large part of that is expected to be special travel. Likewise, the disposable income is expected to go up by 28% which is higher than what it would be in most parts of the world, say America or Europe. And finally, add to that, the online penetration. APAC is expected to spend a lot more time online, which means we will be spending a lot more time researching, discovering, making final decisions. All of this will have its own positive impact on travel too.
The Indian Outbound Growth story
India already in the top five, expected to grow five times over in the next eight to ten years. Our survey also showed that the average look-ahead window in India, which is basically the timetable for somebody to decide that they want to travel to finally change that trip. That look ahead Windows come down to 50, which is actually progressive, because it used to be at 60 and 65. Which means that people are researching more, they are making faster decisions and just making more decisions related to travel.
We saw that travel actually had a 63% user interest, which is one of the highest for any categories. And this is expected to go even further. The other big aspect is the online penetration in India. The online penetration is at 50% with regards to travel, but majority of this is from flight book, if you think about accommodations, packages, stores and fractions, which are actually the higher margin businesses. This penetration is probably about 20% so as the overall penetration of government goes up 60% we expect all of this to have a positive effect. And you know, AI is going to obviously transform and kind of bring support and growth across accommodation, towards experience and packages, which I think makes for a great prospect for businesses in that sense.
Indians contribute 20% of all outbound travel demand from APAC. It's also one of the fastest growing categories. A recent RBI survey shows that in April 2025, Indians spent about $1.3 billion on international travel. India is going to be really at the helm of outbound travel.
Our survey showed that the respondents actually had the intent to take over five trips a year. Now this in comparison to the seven APAC region market is much higher. But the bigger thing over here is that we also showed intent to take these trips for over a week. When I compare this to the seven APAC region average, it's 60% higher. The number on APAC was about four and a half. Which means we want to take more trips. We want to take longer trips. While we're doing that, we're okay to actually compromise a little bit on traditional flight expenses, but actually start to spend a lot more on experience and on shopping and even on your niche pieces like wellness tools."
