India's tourism ministry rolled out a shiny new campaign this month begging foreigners to come back, and the pitch deck probably cost more than my student loans.
The only catch: they also quietly hiked visa fees, tightened e-visa rules, and made it harder for the very people they're courting to actually get in.
It's like throwing a party, then charging a cover at the door and frisking everyone twice.
Here's the thing about India that nobody in Silicon Valley's group chat wants to admit: the country is genuinely spectacular.
You can eat a twelve-course thali for the price of a sad airport sandwich back home, and the train system, when it works, is a miracle of human logistics that makes Amtrak look like a golf cart with delusions.
But the "when it works" part is doing Olympic-level heavy lifting in that sentence.
Foreign tourist arrivals are still crawling back from the pandemic crater, and the government's response has been to... make the paperwork spicier.
Reports of travelers getting visa applications stuck for weeks, of confusing new biometric requirements, of fees that jumped without warning.
Meanwhile, domestic influencers are out here filming "hidden gem" Reels in places that will be shoulder-to-shoulder with tourists by next Diwali.
You cannot simultaneously market yourself as the world's most welcoming destination and treat every visitor like a potential overstay risk.
Now, in fairness, India is not unique in this.
Plenty of countries talk a big hospitality game while their immigration portals run on Windows XP and vibes.
The U.S. is basically the global champion of "come visit, but also please endure a two-hour interrogation about your cousin's LinkedIn." So maybe India learned from the best.
But there's a real economic story here that gets buried under the memes.
Tourism is a massive employer in India, and every foreign visitor who bounces to Thailand or Vietnam instead represents lost income for taxi drivers, homestay owners, and that one uncle in Jaipur who has been trying to sell the same pashmina for a decade.
These are actual humans who need the season to be good.
The frustrating part is that the fix is not rocket science.
Stop pretending that a website from 2011 counts as "digital infrastructure." Do that, and the tourists will come sprinting back with their GoPros and their questionable stomachs of steel.
Instead, we get a campaign that feels like a company restructuring its marketing department while simultaneously laying off the sales team.
So here's my verdict: India is a top-five travel destination trapped inside a customer service experience that occasionally resembles a DMV on a bad day.
The country deserves better marketing than it's giving itself, and travelers deserve a visa process that doesn't feel like a group project where nobody did the reading.
Final Thoughts
Until that changes, the postcards will keep winning arguments that the bureaucracy keeps losing.