Tourists used to flock to India's party capital, Goa. Now many are heading elsewhere

Foreign tourists are falling out of love with Goa - here's why33 minutes agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleNikhil InamdarGetty ImagesGoa's overseas tourist numbers have nearly halved from their pre-Covid peak It is just past noon at the crescent-shaped Palolem beach on the southern tip of Goa's long, sandy coastline. The sun is blinding hot, but that has not deterred the tourist hordes from splashing about in the ocean.The beachside shacks and cheap backpacker hotels hugging the bay in the state often dubbed India's party capital are full with tourists. What's different here from some years ago, though, is that the Europeans and Russians who once thronged Palolem and other beach villages of Goa are missing.The crowd is almost all local, a reflection of the diminishing appeal of this tiny coastal state among foreign tourists. The abundance of domestic visitors, on the other hand, shows that its lure has grown among people from far-flung corners of the country.Numbers released by Goa's tourism department underscore these trends. Nearly 900,000 foreigners visited the state in 2017. By 2025, the number had fallen to around half a million. The number of domestic tourists, on the other hand, grew from 6.8 million in 2016 to more than 10 million last year.The state's tourism department recently said that the global geopolitical situation has been affecting overseas flows. "We have to remain both pessimistic and optimistic while planning ahead," Rohan Khaunte, Goa's tourism minister told a local outlet. But the decline in numbers predates the recent conflict, which begs the question: why are foreign visitors, who've patronised the relaxed budget getaway since the hippie heyday of the 1960s and 1970s, now turning away?Getty ImagesMore affordable alternatives like Sri Lanka are giving tough competition to Goa's tourist economy"People are just hard up. There was Covid and then the war [with Ukraine] and now f...