Following a resilient 2024 and a bumpy-but-recovering 2025, India’s travel companies are cautiously hopeful about the year ahead — even after a festive season that saw airfares spike sharply and traveler sentiment wobble following a tragic Air India crash and geopolitical shocks earlier in the year.
Thomas Cook India has signaled optimism about a rebound in domestic travel demand, while Booking.com and other players remain more measured, pointing to affordability concerns and an unpredictable events calendar as reasons for caution heading into 2026.
Domestic Air Travel Hits Record Highs
According to the latest Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) data, India’s domestic air passenger traffic crossed 152.6 million (15.26 crore) between January and November 2025 — a 4.26% rise over the same period the previous year, with monthly traffic breaking the 15-million mark for the first time ever in November 2025.
India has also cemented its place as the world’s fifth-biggest aviation market, handling 211 million passengers in 2024 (domestic and international combined), an 11.1% jump over 2023, putting it just ahead of Japan and behind only the US, China, the UK, and Spain.
Thomas Cook on Demand Trends Through 2025
Thomas Cook India’s leadership has flagged a pattern of strong underlying demand interrupted by shocks. “Before April 21 [a day before the Pahalgam terror attack], our domestic travel bookings were trending about 25% ahead of the previous year. As the situation unfolded, this volume started to fall, and by the end of June, our forward bookings had dropped by 11% compared with the same period last year,” the company’s leadership noted, adding that bookings picked back up through July and that the second half of the year was expected to outperform the first as traveler confidence steadied.
Festive Season 2025: Record Traffic, Record Fares
The travel sector saw a similarly uneven pattern around the 2025 festive season. Domestic air traffic during the Diwali period (October 20, 2025) rose roughly 5% year-on-year, with airlines adding around 1,700 extra flights and the DGCA stepping in to keep a lid on fares.
Even so, airfares on several popular routes surged 30–35% in the run-up to the festival — and by as much as 400% on select high-demand sectors — reviving the same affordability concerns that shadowed the sector a year earlier. Indian Railways, meanwhile, ran over 12,000 special trains to absorb the overflow, ferrying more than 1.5 crore passengers during the festive rush, well above the previous year’s numbers.
Airfares Remain the Industry’s Biggest Worry
“I have not heard of too many blockbuster events lined up for the year ahead. For us, there is cautious optimism about what 2026 holds. How long will people continue to pay higher prices is the question on everybody’s mind. At the moment we are not seeing hotels drop prices yet — everybody is in a wait-and-watch mode to see who bells the cat first,” a senior industry executive said, a sentiment that continues to resonate with operators heading into 2026.
Shifting Traveler Preferences
While forecasts for 2026 vary, travel industry professionals continue to notice a structural shift in Indian travel preferences: younger travelers going more often, in smaller groups, with far less seasonality than before.
Thomas Cook’s own research backs this up — its latest Holiday Report found that a large share of urban Indian travelers now plan 4–6 trips a year instead of 2, want to raise their travel spend by 20–50%, and increasingly favor short, experience-led “mini-cations” over the traditional family vacation built around long weekends.
Inbound Tourism: Closing the Gap to 2019
On the inbound side, the recovery remains incomplete. Foreign tourist arrivals (FTAs) climbed to 9.95 million in 2024, a 4.52% rise over 2023’s 9.51 million, but still short of the pre-pandemic 2019 peak of 10.93 million, per the Ministry of Tourism’s latest data.
Non-resident Indian (NRI) arrivals, by contrast, have already blown past pre-pandemic levels, hitting 10.62 million in 2024 versus 6.98 million in 2019 — pushing total international tourist arrivals to 20.57 million, nearly 15% above 2019. Early 2025 numbers suggest FTA growth cooled somewhat following the Pahalgam attack, though industry bodies still expect the country to land close to, or just above, the 10-million mark for the year, with full recovery to 2019 levels remaining the next milestone to watch.
The Road Back to 2019
“Inbound travel to India remains to be seen — whether we will get back to and beyond 2019 levels. I’d expect organic growth to continue, but fingers crossed,” an industry leader observed, a line that could just as easily have been written for 2026 as it was for the year before.
Meanwhile, easing geopolitical tensions and improving connectivity have kept Europe-to-Asia travel patterns in flux, with Thomas Cook continuing to report steady interest from European travelers choosing India and other Asian destinations over the winter season — part of a broader rebalancing of long-haul routes still playing out as the World Cup and other marquee global events reshape travel calendars from one year to the next.
The Bottom Line for 2026
India’s travel sector heads into 2026 on firmer footing than a year ago, with record passenger volumes, a fast-growing domestic aviation market, and stronger inbound numbers — but persistently high airfares, a thinner events calendar, and lingering caution from 2025’s shocks mean most operators are, once again, in wait-and-watch mode.
