Indians are on the move. According to a report by Thomas Cook & SOTC Travel 85 per cent of survey respondents lean towards “both short breaks and longer vacations”; 84 per cent plan to ramp up their travel spending by 20 to 50 per cent; 60 per cent are for experiential travel; 54 per cent seek longer holidays, both within the country and abroad.
The survey by travel services company says Indians crave experiential, event-oriented journeys like “polar and icebreaker cruises, music concerts, global sporting events, wildlife safaris, gastronomy and vineyard trails, stargazing camps and phenomenon travel—Northern Lights, Cherry Blossom, Midnight Sun, etc.” Travel bookings are driven by a blend of physical and digital interactions, called phygital journeys.
Holidays in the monsoon season, which doesn’t lend itself to traveling, is gaining momentum. Diverse travel consumers favour the season— “Gen Z and millennials, working professionals, couples, multigenerational families, a rising segment-‘frolleagues’- colleagues who double as friends.”
Moreover, India’s outbound tourism market is growing fast. Everything is grist for the Indian traveller’s mill. Maybe, Indians are figuring themselves out: who they are, or forgetting who they really are, while on the road, in the air, on the water. It looks like spelunking is not far off.
Thomas Cook’s 2026 business travel report says 65 per cent corporates expect business travel volumes to rise in 2026; 68 per cent see the trend of business and leisure—‘bleisure’—travel growing and so on.
A peculiar thing about travel in India is that it is sometimes cheaper to travel abroad, say Thailand, than domestically.
“That’s very telling of the capitalist system itself. That is one of the possibilities that capitalism brings and the kind of an artificial price inflation or price deflation that it is capable of,” says Nitin Bathla. He is a researcher in Infrastructure Geography at the University of Zurich. He is an author of the award-winning book Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methodologies in Landscape and Urban Studies and the critically acclaimed documentary Not Just Roads. Previously, he worked on agrarian-urban land transformations and infrastructure expansion in India.
Car travel has exploded too. Under the Bharatmala programme of the government, the highway system is being modernised and privatised. More highways and highways lanes are being added.
According to the Economic Survey 2025-26, the roads and highways sector continues to be a primary driver of India’s infrastructure. For the financial year 2025-2026, 10,000 km of construction is targeted, of which 4,938 km has been completed by December 2025.
“It's a phenomenon whereby the urban middle classes are able to really unlock the full potential of their car and treat the landscape as their own. So it's almost like a commodification of landscape,” Bathla tells Hot Rock.
He says the first motorway or highway was developed in 1920s, 1930s in Italy. This was a highway that connected the city of Milan to the Lago Maggiore region.
“The idea around it was exactly to develop a sort of a street system where you have a primacy of the car and the urban middle classes from Milan can go and explore nature. So, there is a commodification of nature,” he says.
As the Thomas Cook report mentions, and Bathla says, a big chunk of travel in India is devotional travel, which has always been the case. He mentions what this amounts to is “time-space compression”. David Harvey, the U.S. Marxist geographer, pioneered the idea that capitalism, in tandem with developments in transportation, communication and technology, collapses distances and time.
Applying that to the Indian context, what it would have taken for you to complete Chardham yatra takes much less time today.
“Highways are compressing that space. The journey that took weeks and months now takes a couple of days just to complete,” Bathla says. “So, people don't think twice before doing such things. The numbers have shot exponentially. In my opinion, they have shot as much as 10 times. And this is causing a lot of burden on places.”
Not only are places and people facing increased pressure from people coming in large numbers, the boom in travel, including that of foreigners coming to India, is putting local places in jeopardy. A staggering report— Parvati Valley built a music, rave and drug economy. Now it doesn’t know where it’s headed—brings home where this is heading. Travellers don’t pay for the waste that they leave behind.
Bathla says India’s religion and culture has a sacred geography and that “the current travel boom is mapping onto that sacred geography”.
Asked if highway expansion is an evolutionary stage in country’s development, he says, “I don't know about the evolutionary state of a country because I think in the US, traveling or the expansion of the interstate highway system was very important for the development of its economy and it resulted in a path-dependent economy that India is trying to follow.”
It’s not the same with every country though. In developed countries like Iceland and Norway, the highways don’t stretch to every corner of the country. These countries decided to make it harder for people to go deeper into the countryside.
“It is dependent on the values a country holds dear,” Bathla says.
For a long time, India invested in the colonial infrastructure like the railways, modernised it to make a public infrastructure that enabled cross-country travel. “I think we should reconsider some of the original values around travel and tourism, the austerity of travel that pilgrimage travel held. We have to go back to those roots because I think we have lost all of that and we're becoming very resource dependent which is not so good for our economy in the long term,” he says.
