For a country whose travellers are among the most sought-after in the world, Indians seem to spend an inordinate amount of time being told how badly they travel.
According to the Mastercard Economics Institute’s Travel Trends 2025 report, India is among the world’s fastest-growing outbound travel markets, with destinations such as Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, Indonesia and the UAE reporting a surge in Indian arrivals. Thailand alone welcomed more than 2.1 million Indian visitors in 2024, according to the Tourism Authority of Thailand, making India one of its largest and most valuable source markets. However, in a U-turn recently, the country rolled back its 60-day visa-free scheme for 93 countries, including India, moving Indian travellers back to a paid Visa-on-Arrival category as part of a broader tightening of immigration and tourism rules, requiring travellers to pay a fee of 2,000 Thai Baht (roughly ₹5,500-6,000), while also introducing additional entry formalities such as the mandatory Thailand Digital Arrival Card (TDAC). Thai authorities cited concerns around overstays, illegal employment and the misuse of long-term tourist permissions.
The move speaks to a broader tension in global tourism. Countries want the spending power that comes with a booming travel market, but they are also grappling with the realities of managing ever-growing visitor numbers.
The internet, meanwhile, has its own explanation.
Indians on vacation
| Photo Credit:
Klaus Vedfelt
Scroll through social media and you would think the Indian traveller is single-handedly responsible for the collapse of global decorum.
There was the group filmed performing garba beside a parked aircraft in Vietnam, followed by the inevitable commentary about Indians carrying theplas abroad, filming reels at landmarks and treating public spaces like private stages. A handful of incidents quickly became evidence of something larger: a supposed national inability to travel well.
The reactions are often fascinating not because of what happened, but because of how quickly the conversation escalates.
None of this is to suggest that Indian travellers should be immune from criticism. Every traveller has a responsibility to respect local customs, public spaces and the people who live there. There are Indians who behave badly abroad. There are Indians who mistake tourism for ownership, and those who, like travellers everywhere, occasionally mistake a holiday for a suspension of social norms.
The only problem is that this is true of almost everyone else too.
Man napping at Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi
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NurPhoto
Pranav Sharma, a second-generation hotelier and founder of Manuscript Jhilwara Haveli in Udaipur, is no stranger to the quirks of global tourism. Before returning to India a few years ago, he worked with design-led boutique hospitality properties in Berlin.
“Every large travelling population eventually develops a reputation, fair or unfair,” he says. “The British tourist spent decades perfecting the art form. Entire stretches of Spain, Greece and Thailand built reputations around young Britons treating weekends abroad as endurance contests involving cheap alcohol and questionable decisions. There is a reason ‘stag do in Prague’ conjures such a specific image.” For years, cities such as Prague, Budapest, Kraków, Riga and parts of Spain became famous for attracting groups of young British men on cheap weekend trips centred around drinking, nightlife and, occasionally, behaviour that locals would rather forget.
Americans too have long been caricatured as loud and culturally oblivious. Chinese tourists spent much of the 2000s and 2010s under intense scrutiny as outbound travel from China exploded, with international headlines focusing on public etiquette, overcrowding at attractions and the occasional visitor behaving badly at a heritage site.
Even India’s own backpacker circuit has its travel folklore. Destinations such as Kasol, Pushkar and Udaipur have long traded stories about Israeli backpackers, just as parts of Europe have about British party tourists.
“Every travel circuit develops these stories,” Pranav says. “They’re part of the folklore that emerges when large groups of people move through the same places year after year.”
What strikes him about the current discourse surrounding Indians is how familiar it feels.
“You’d think the greatest threat facing international tourism is a family unpacking theplas and lahsun chutney halfway up a Swiss mountain, or a group deciding that a departure gate is an appropriate venue for a spontaneous round of garba.”
Indian tourists at Siraj Bagh tulip garden in Kashmir
| Photo Credit:
Yawar Nazir
In many ways, Pranav’s observation echoes that of Sumir Nagar, a board advisor, behavioural specialist and performance coach who has worked in the banking sector across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific for over three decades.
“It’s the same script each time, only the face changes,” Sumir says.
In the 1980s, Japanese tourists became shorthand for a particular type of traveller as Japan’s economic boom and a strong yen enabled millions to travel abroad, says Sumir. Western media often caricatured them as travelling in tightly organised groups, cameras slung around their necks, photographing everything in sight and rushing from one landmark to the next. The stereotype became so pervasive that psychiatrists even coined the term Paris Syndrome to describe the profound disappointment some Japanese visitors reportedly experienced when the romanticised Paris of their imagination failed to match reality.
“We are not the exception. We are the latest occupant of a chair the Japanese sat in, then the Chinese, and someone else will inherit the moment a new economy puts a few hundred million first-time passport-holders on planes,” says Sumir.
What makes the Indian traveller particularly vulnerable to stereotyping, he argues, is visibility.
“For most of the world, the Indian in front of them is the only India they will ever get,” he says. “The German behaving badly by the pool gets read as an individual. We get read as a category.”
The spotlight on Indians
Journalist Prathap Nair, who grew up across South India and has spent the better part of a decade living in Germany, suspects the obsession with the supposedly unruly Indian traveller is often stronger in India than abroad.
“One viral video does not an unruly Indian traveller make,” he says. “Just because you’ve seen a couple of videos of people singing bhajans, shouting religious slogans or behaving badly abroad doesn’t mean that’s representative of millions of Indians who travel every year.”
Whenever he encounters Indian travellers in Europe, Prathap says, they are largely polite, respectful and eager to follow the rules. “Most people are trying to blend in, not stand out.” What social media captures, he argues, is not everyday behaviour but exceptional behaviour.
Indian backpackers
| Photo Credit:
Mayur Kakade
“The problem is that social media rewards the unusual. Nobody posts a video of tourists quietly following the rules and minding their own business. They post the one incident that gets clicks.”
An IT consultant from Bengaluru, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of his comments, believes the conversation around Indian travellers cannot be separated from questions of class, hierarchy and how people relate to places they perceive as being “for them”.
In his experience, some of the behaviour criticised abroad is not unique to international travel at all. Similar patterns can often be observed within India itself.
“You see it when tourists from big cities travel to places such as Ladakh, the Northeast, Mussoorie or Shimla,” he says. “The locals want tourism and depend on it economically, so they tolerate a lot. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t frustrated.”
He recalls conversations with hospitality professionals in the hills who spoke about the need to constantly remind visitors, especially from the North, to be mindful of their surroundings.
“I remember a hotelier in Mussoorie telling me that they routinely have to request guests from metropolitan cities to lower the volume of their music because people forget they’re in a quiet mountain town and not in the middle of a city,” he says.
For him, the issue is often rooted in social conditioning. “India is a deeply hierarchical society. Class, status and power shape many of our interactions, often without us even realising it. Sometimes those assumptions travel with us.”
In his experience, Indians often behave differently depending on where they are travelling. “I’ve noticed that people are generally more conscious of rules and social norms in Europe or the United States,” he says. “But in parts of Southeast Asia, where travel is cheaper and more accessible, you occasionally see a greater sense of entitlement.”
“That’s not true of every traveller, obviously,” he says. “But there can be an unconscious tendency to be more deferential in places we perceive as powerful and less mindful in places we don’t.”
At the same time, he cautions against turning these observations into sweeping judgments. “Most Indians travelling abroad are perfectly respectful,” he says. “The problem is that nobody remembers the thousands of people behaving normally. They remember the one person behaving badly.”
Mumbai-based journalist Mansi Shah believes Indians themselves are partly responsible for keeping the stereotype alive.
During a recent family holiday in Georgia, she recalls waiting for a buggy at a hotel when another guest from West Asia abruptly cut the queue and took it. Nobody protested.
“What struck me was that if the people involved had been Indian, there’s a good chance someone would have filmed it, posted it online and turned it into a conversation about how Indians behave abroad,” she says.
Having grown up in Dubai and travelled extensively, Mansi says she has witnessed entitlement, impatience and discourtesy from travellers of every nationality. “I’ve seen behaviour from people across the world, including from parts of West Asia, that would be considered incredibly rude if it were captured on camera,” she says. “The difference is that it rarely becomes a broader conversation about an entire nationality.
For Mansi, the issue is one of proportionality. “I think sometimes we dislike ourselves more than anybody else does,” she says. “The Indian traveller has become an easy target.”
Nobody, she stresses, is defending harassment, disrespect or genuinely disruptive conduct. But not every incident deserves to become a national conversation.
She points to the recent outrage over airport garba videos as an example. “People were dancing,” she says. “You’d think a diplomatic crisis had unfolded.”
The disconnect becomes even more apparent when viewed through the lens of the travel industry.
Gcobani Mancotywa, Regional General Manager (Australasia, MEISEA and China) at South African Tourism, notes that India is among South Africa’s top 10 source markets globally. Nearly 70,000 Indians visited South Africa in 2025, while more than 82,500 travelled there between January 2025 and March 2026. More importantly, he says, Indian travellers are increasingly seeking authentic and immersive experiences centred around wildlife, culture, food and local communities.
“Indian travellers are valued not only for the economic contribution they make across the tourism value chain, but also for the meaningful way in which they engage with the destination,” Gcobani says.
If social media sees Indian travellers through the lens of viral videos, the travel industry sees them through the lens of numbers.
Keyur Joshi, founder of eco-resort Tipai by Wildlife Luxuries, located around 170 kilometres from Nagpur, and former co-founder of MakeMyTrip, touted as India’s largest online travel company, argues that the conversation online bears little resemblance to how destinations, airlines and hospitality brands view the Indian traveller.
Senior couple on vacation
| Photo Credit:
triloks
“Social media amplifies isolated incidents, while the travel industry looks at growth, spending and long-term value,” he says.
According to estimates cited by Keyur, India, at one point, accounted for more than 30 million international departures annually, while Indian travellers have spent upwards of US$40 billion (around ₹3,798 crore) overseas. Increasingly, that money is being spent on luxury accommodation, curated experiences, gastronomy, wellness and adventure travel.
“Indian outbound travel has evolved from a volume story to a value story,” Keyur says. “The industry isn’t focused on a viral reel from an airport. It’s looking at a traveller who is spending more, travelling further and becoming increasingly important to destinations worldwide.”
That does not mean all criticism is unwarranted. Rahul Jagtiani, luxury travel specialist and host of travel podcast, The Plush Podcast, believes India is producing a new generation of international travellers at extraordinary speed.
“We’re a new class of traveller. We feel we’ve arrived as an economy, but we’re still learning.”
Some of the friction, he says, stems from habits forged in one of the world’s most densely populated societies.
“We’ve not learned how to respect public space because there is very little public space in India. We’re 1.4 billion people packed tightly together.”
His point is not that Indians are uniquely inconsiderate, but that certain habits do not always translate seamlessly overseas. The answer, he suggests, is not shame but awareness.
“When millions of people from a rapidly rising economy begin travelling the world, they become impossible to ignore. And once that happens, every mildly ridiculous holiday moment begins carrying a weight it was never meant to bear,” says Rahul.
That may be the real burden of being an Indian traveller today. Not that people notice when you get something wrong, but that they often assume you were speaking for everyone else when you did.
