It’s just past noon at the crescent-shaped Palolem Beach, on the southern tip of Goa’s long coastline. The sun is blazing, but that hasn’t stopped crowds of tourists from splashing in the sea. The beachside shacks and budget backpacker hotels that line the bay, in the state often called India’s party capital, are bustling with visitors, reports BBC.
But what’s noticeably different from years past is the absence of the Europeans and Russians who once flocked to Palolem and other Goan beach villages. Today, the crowd is overwhelmingly local—a sign of Goa’s fading appeal among international travelers. At the same time, the surge in domestic tourists shows the state has become more attractive to Indians from far-flung regions.
Official figures from Goa’s tourism department highlight the shift. In 2017, nearly 900,000 foreign tourists visited the state. By 2025, that number had dropped to roughly half a million. Meanwhile, domestic tourist numbers rose from 6.8 million in 2016 to over 10 million last year.
The state’s tourism department has pointed to global geopolitical tensions as a factor. “We have to be both pessimistic and optimistic as we plan ahead,” Goa’s tourism minister, Rohan Khaunte, told a local outlet.
But the decline began well before recent conflicts, raising the question: why are foreign visitors—who have loved Goa as a relaxed, budget-friendly escape since the hippie heyday of the 1960s and ’70s—now staying away?
“People are just short on money. There was Covid, then the war [with Ukraine], and now flights are expensive because of what’s happening in the Middle East. Money is definitely a factor,” says Sophie, a Russian ballet dancer on her fifth trip to Goa. “Some of my friends are choosing Turkey or Egypt this year—they’re closer to home and cheaper.”
Rico, a visitor from Newcastle who has been coming to Goa for 20 years, agrees. “Back in the UK, people have less money for overseas travel. For the last three or four years, they’ve been taking more holidays at home,” he says.
Half a dozen foreign tourists the BBC spoke to also blamed longer, more cumbersome visa procedures and a hike in the five-year visa fee for the drop in numbers.
Ernest Dias, a committee member of Goa’s tourism department who runs a large travel charter company, says cheaper hotels and easier on-arrival visas have drawn European and Russian visitors to other Asian destinations—especially Vietnam and Sri Lanka. “Today’s traveler wants to make quick decisions and last-minute trips. So the visa delay is a big factor in the drop,” he told the BBC.
He added that a major Russian charter group recently canceled its planned Goa trip and went to Vietnam instead, where demand has “hit the roof.”
Beyond visas, affordability is key. According to Dias, the boom in domestic tourists and the MICE economy (meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions) has priced many foreign visitors out of higher-rated hotels. Affordable beachfront resorts are also scarcer in Goa than in Vietnam, Sri Lanka, or Thailand, where package deals can be half the price.
The cancellation of a direct Air India flight from London Gatwick to Goa has also hurt.
At a shack off Benaulim Beach, north of Palolem, Nicola, a hairdresser visiting for three weeks with friends Alison and Dwayne, told the BBC she had to make an unplanned layover in Mumbai because of the axed service—an inconvenience. She said her brother chose Sri Lanka this year instead. “It’s definitely more up-and-coming. He thought it was more affordable and also far cleaner than Goa.”
Dias says the government has stepped up efforts to keep beaches litter-free but admits that many roads leading to them are marred by garbage—“not a good look, especially for foreign tourists who are very particular about cleanliness.”
Prohibitively high taxi fares, due to local unions’ aggressive resistance to app-based services, are another “big problem,” he says. “It’s like living in the Stone Age—you can’t get a taxi on your app in Goa because local unions will confront them.”
None of this bodes well for Goa’s tourist-dependent economy. Shervyn Lobo, who runs a 100-room hotel near Baga Beach, says foreign footfall at his property has dropped by at least 10%. While he has offset some losses with higher local bookings, he notes that foreigners are preferred guests because they stay longer and keep rooms occupied. They’re also more likely to buy excursions, rent motorbikes, and eat at local shacks and restaurants, compared with Indian visitors who often prefer full-board vacations—highlighting how the decline in overseas tourists affects the broader ecosystem.
Still, the local government has woken up to the problem, says Dias, admitting that Goa may have let its guard down for too long. “We are now trying our best to get foreigners back with road shows. We recently went to Poland, and Scandinavia is our next target market,” he said, adding that the state also hopes to attract more non-European visitors from Asia and Africa in the coming years.
But with cheaper, cleaner, and more aggressively tourism-focused alternatives rising across the continent, this land of whitewashed churches, colorful Portuguese homes, and charming susegad people (the quintessential Goan art of slow living) will have to work much harder to win them back.
