Visa announced news on Wednesday (March 14) that it released its Global Travel Intentions Study, which spotlighted trends in tourism and travel in 2017, stretching across 12,000 respondents.
Among the insights gleaned from the study: Indian travelers have blended business travel with “leisure add-ons,” and those travelers lead the region with frequency and length of trips.
Travelers from India logged an average of 5.6 trips over the past two years, outpacing the 4.7 trips taken by individuals from the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. Breaking down those headline numbers a bit, business travel marked 2.6 trips versus an average of 1.6 for the region at large.
In addition, Indian travelers spent significantly more than those from the APAC region, at $2,334, where the latter spent $1,677. The future looks bright too, as Indian travelers are expected to spend 21 percent more over the next two years.
In an emailed statement that attended the release, TR Ramachandran, group country manager, India & South Asia, Visa, noted that “the GTI study has thrown up some very interesting travel insights, including the growing preference for digital payments, with over 84 percent of Indian travelers preferring to pay by card for booking their vacation and 51 percent spending through their cards while on vacation. Even with travelers who preferred carrying cash on vacation, over 94 percent [of] Indians reported bringing back unspent cash, indicating the wide acceptance of digital payments and cards in particular. This augurs well for the digital-first approach we have adopted in India.”
Key reasons for traveling, found Visa, include: bonding with family, “disconnecting” and traveling as a “reward.” As many as 45 percent of Indian travelers based their destinations on personal safety, while only 21 percent chose destinations based on cyberattacks tied to a given region. The countries most visited were Australia, the United States and Japan.
As for technology and payments, Indians turn to tech to plan trips and navigate through them once they embark — to the tune of 97 percent. They also spend the least amount of cash among the APAC cohort (at 51 percent), at 35 percent, while across the globe that percentage stood at 53 percent. Overall, some 96 percent of Indians made impromptu plans to travel, said Visa.
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