India needs to relax visa rules to lure more tourists, says Agoda CEO

The Indian government should look to relax visa rules to promote the country as a major tourist destination, said Omri Morgenshtern, the chief executive of Singapore-headquartered online travel platform Agoda. "The basic thing to attract tourists to a country is relaxing visa rules and increasing the number of flights. If there is a visa restriction, then that's a friction," Morgenshtern told ET in an interview.

He said searches on India on the platform have grown 60% since 2019. "What's fascinating is that a lot of searches are coming from beyond the usual markets for India like the US and Middle East. A lot of people from Asian countries like Japan are finding India fascinating," he said. Indians are travelling abroad like never before, taking advantage of airfares and hotel rates on a par with domestic travel and free visas offered by many countries. However, inbound travel remains below pre-Covid-19 levels recorded in 2019, despite growing after the pandemic, according to tourism ministry data.

Recently, China added Ireland and Switzerland to the list of countries whose passport holders can enter the nation without visas. The move expanded China's outreach to European travellers after the country recently granted visa-free tourism and business access to citizens of France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain for 15 days.


India should also market itself aggressively to foreign tourists, Morgenshtern said.

"How do you let people know that it's a good idea to come here? There are a lot of ways to do that. But one interesting way other countries are starting to do is big events," he said, citing examples of the recent Taylor Swift concert in Japan and F1 race in Singapore. The government is framing a national policy to transform India's airports into major international hubs that will offer single-point international connectivity to the entire South Asian region. The policy, which will need Cabinet approval, aims to frame laws for easing visa as well as security and immigration bottlenecks at airports to make things easier for travel.

Agoda is looking to accelerate the rate of getting new accommodations such as hotels and homestay on its platform, said its CEO.

"India is by far the number one country in terms of acquiring new properties for us because even though we have a lot of properties and work with a lot of partners that help us or allow us to sell their properties, we are finding more and more properties that we can bring to our platform more than anybody anywhere else in the market," Morgenshtern said. Beyond the metros with four and five-star hotels, Agoda is focussing on growing in smaller cities while also working on enhancing awareness about the company among customers in the country, he said.

"The second-tier cities are growing very, very fast, not only for us but in general for travel in those areas. This is a big effort for us," Morgenshtern said, adding that Agoda's other area of focus is also providing "persistent trips" where it offers a total travel package.