The growth rate of international visitor arrivals to India slowed to less than 2% in October 2015.
According to the latest data from the country’s Ministry of Tourism, India welcomed 680,000 overseas visitors last month, up 1.7% compared to October 2014. But this growth rate is lower than 4.3% year-on-year growth rate for cumulative arrivals in the first 10 months of 2015, and significantly slower than the 10.2% growth experienced in 2014.
This slowdown is perhaps surprising, given the strong performance of the Indian economy and the expansion of the country’s e-tourist visa scheme, which is supposed to make it easier to visit India.
Neighbouring Bangladesh (15.2% of total arrivals) was India’s largest source market in October 2015, followed by the US (13.0%), UK (11.3%), Sri Lanka (3.7%) and Germany (3.6%).
And 34.0% of visitors entered India through Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, making it the country’s largest gateway ahead of Mumbai airport (16.9%), the Haridaspur land border (8.7%), Chennai airport (7.5%) and Bengaluru airport (6.2%).
India’s international tourism revenues declined in October 2015, falling 4.3% year-on-year to INR96.11 billion (US$1.45bn).
For the first 10 months of 2015, India has now welcomed 6.29 million international visitors, up 4.3% year-on-year, while tourism revenues increased 2.5% to INR1.013 trillion.
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