“People are just hard up. There was Covid and then the war [with Ukraine] and now flights are so expensive because of what’s happening in the Middle East – so money is definitely a factor,” says Sophie, a ballet dancer from Russia who is on her fifth trip here.
“Some of my friends are choosing Turkey or Egypt over Goa this year because its closer to home and cheaper.”
Rico, who’s been visiting for the last 20 years from Newcastle, feels the same way about European visitors.
“Certainly in my country folks at the moment have a lot less money to go overseas. For the last three-four years they’ve tended to take more holidays at home,” he says.
Some half-a-dozen foreign tourists that the BBC spoke to also blamed longer and more cumbersome visa procedures and a hike in the five-year visa fees for the decline in visitor numbers.
Ernest Dias, who is a committee member at Goa’s Department of Tourism and runs a large travel charter company, says cheaper hotels and easier on-arrival visas have prompted European and Russian visitors to look elsewhere in Asia too – Vietnam and Sri Lanka in particular.
“Today’s traveller wants to make quick decisions and take last-minute trips. So this [the visa delay] is definitely a big contributing factor to the drop in numbers,” Dias told the BBC.
He says a big Russian charter group recently cancelled their planned Goa trip and went to Vietnam instead where demand has “hit the roof”.
Besides on-arrival visas, affordability is a key factor behind the outperformance of these countries relative to Goa.
The boom in domestic visitors as well as the MICE economy (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions) has priced out many foreign visitors from hotels with good star ratings, according to Dias.
Supply of affordable beach-front resorts is also more limited in Goa compared with Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Thailand, where one can get a package deal at half the rate, if not cheaper.
The axing of a direct London Gatwick-Goa Air India service has also had an impact.
