Ask what Indians do when they travel and most policy documents will answer with beaches, heritage circuits and hill stations. The survey released this week gives a different answer: forty-eight out of every hundred overnight trips are undertaken for pilgrimage and religious purposes.
On 23 September 2026, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation released the findings of the Domestic Tourism Expenditure Survey, conducted by the National Statistics Office as part of the NSS 80th round between July 2025 and June 2026, in a report titled 'Domestic Tourism in India'.
Read the reference period before you read the number
The survey's structure is unusual and the single most important thing to grasp about it, because the headline figures appear to contradict each other until you see why.
Data were collected in three distinct frames:
- Overnight trips completed in the last 365 days, for the purposes holidaying, leisure and recreation; pilgrimage and religious; health and medical; and shopping
- Overnight trips completed in the last 30 days, for the purposes business; social; education and training; and others
- Same-day trips completed in the last 30 days
So when the survey reports that pilgrimage accounts for 48 per cent of trips and also that social visits account for 89 per cent, these are not competing claims. They describe different sets of purposes measured over different windows.
The design reason is recall. A survey asks people to remember. Infrequent, memorable, expensive journeys — a pilgrimage, a holiday, a hospital visit in another city — are remembered accurately for a year. Frequent, routine trips — visiting relatives, a business journey — blur together over that span, and asking about twelve months of them produces systematic under-reporting. Assigning the rare purposes to a 365-day window and the frequent ones to a 30-day window captures each where memory is reliable.
This is a genuinely useful methodological point, and it carries beyond tourism. It is the same reasoning behind the usual-status and current-weekly-status distinction we set out in our explainer on India's first district-level labour market indicators: the reference period is part of the definition, not a detail of administration.
What the 365-day window shows
Trips generated per 100 tourist households — households reporting at least one overnight trip — were 127 in rural areas and 132 in urban areas, against 118 and 121 respectively in 2014-15. Travel has become more frequent among households that travel at all.
Pilgrimage and religious purposes took the largest share at 48 per cent, and did so in both rural and urban India. The second place splits by sector, and the split is the most revealing finding in the release: in rural areas it is health and medical at 38.4 per cent; in urban areas it is holidaying, leisure and recreation at 36.4 per cent.
That single contrast describes two different countries travelling for two different reasons. Urban India travels for leisure. Rural India travels to reach a doctor.
The expenditure data confirm it. Health and medical trips recorded the highest expenditure of any category — ₹29,454 in rural areas and ₹41,649 in urban areas. These are not discretionary sums. For a rural household, a figure near ₹30,000 for a single episode of travel to obtain treatment is a substantial share of annual income, and it is a well-documented driver of distress borrowing. A trip counted in a tourism survey is, in this case, a measure of the distance between a household and a hospital.
Other findings from the window:
- Average trip size 2.03 overnight visitors per trip; about 80 per cent of visitors stayed five days or less
- May and October were the peak months for holidaying trips — the school vacation and the post-monsoon festival season
- Mode of travel diverged sharply: bus dominated for rural households at 32 per cent of visitor-trips, while train was the most used by urban households at 35 per cent
- Type of stay also diverged: urban visitors used hotels and guesthouses most (36 per cent), while in rural areas the largest share (28 per cent) was other non-commercial stays — a second home, employer-provided accommodation, or free accommodation from a religious or missionary organisation
- By destination, Uttar Pradesh took the highest share of total visitor-trips at 15.7 per cent, followed by Tamil Nadu at 13.4 per cent and Rajasthan at 8.0 per cent
- For holidaying trips, the largest expenditure component was transport
The state ranking is itself a comment on the pilgrimage finding. Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu lead not because they are the country's premier leisure destinations but because they hold its densest concentrations of major pilgrimage sites.
What the 30-day window shows
Here the picture changes completely, as the design intends.
Trips per 100 tourist households were 113 rural and 111 urban. Social purposes accounted for 89 per cent of all such trips — visiting family, weddings, funerals, festivals. Average trip size was 1.95 visitors, with about 45 per cent of visitor-trips lasting two to three days.
Bus dominated both sectors here — 48 per cent rural, 44 per cent urban — and the majority stayed at friends' and relatives' places rather than in paid accommodation. The destination ranking shifts to Uttar Pradesh 15.5 per cent, Bihar 10.5 per cent and Tamil Nadu 9.6 per cent, with Bihar's appearance reflecting the return travel of a state that sends large numbers of migrant workers elsewhere.
On spending, business trips recorded the maximum average expenditure per trip at ₹5,949. By sector, households spent most on business trips in both rural (₹5,179) and urban (₹6,934) areas.
Note what this means economically. The most frequent travel — social visits — generates very little commercial demand, because it uses buses and stays with relatives. The most expensive per trip — business travel — is a small share of trips. The tourism economy that hotels and airlines serve is a minority of the tourism that actually happens.
Same-day trips, and the shopping finding
For same-day trips in the last 30 days, social purposes led at 33 per cent and shopping followed at 26 per cent — but shopping accounted for the highest share of expenditure in both rural and urban areas.
This is worth a moment. A same-day shopping trip to a larger town is counted here as domestic tourism, and in the national accounts sense it is: it is travel outside the usual environment, generating transport and retail spending. It also describes something structural — the absence of goods and services in smaller settlements, which obliges households to travel to obtain them. The expenditure share attaches to the purchases rather than to the journey, which is precisely why it is the largest.
Why a statistical office measures tourism at all
Tourism is awkward to measure because it is not an industry in the way steel or textiles are. There is no single set of firms producing "tourism". A tourist buys transport, accommodation, food, retail goods and services from sectors that also serve everybody else.
The internationally used solution is the Tourism Satellite Account, which estimates tourism's contribution by working from the demand side — identifying what visitors spent — rather than from a supply-side industry classification. A household expenditure survey of this kind is the primary input to that estimate, which is why the exercise sits with the NSO rather than with the tourism ministry.
The definitional core is that a visitor is someone travelling outside their usual environment for less than a year, for any purpose other than employment by an entity in the place visited. Two consequences follow, and both explain results that look strange at first. A person travelling for medical treatment is a tourist under this definition, which is how health and medical trips come to sit in a tourism survey at all. And a commuter is not, because the daily workplace lies inside the usual environment.
India's statistical apparatus and its lineage are covered in our piece on National Statistics Day and Mahalanobis; how a headline aggregate should and should not be read, in our explainer on reading a growth number properly.
The policy reading
If half of domestic overnight travel is religious and a large further share is medical, then several conclusions follow that a conventional tourism strategy would miss.
Investment in pilgrimage infrastructure — crowd management, sanitation, affordable accommodation, safe transport — reaches far more travellers than investment in leisure circuits. The travellers on these trips are also, on average, less wealthy, and the facilities they use are more often free or informal.
The rural health and medical figure is not a tourism finding at all. It is a health-systems finding that has turned up in a tourism survey, and the appropriate response to it is not in the tourism budget.
And the dominance of bus travel and staying with relatives should temper claims about tourism's multiplier effects. Most domestic travel in India generates far less commercial spending per trip than the sector's headline growth figures imply, because most of it was never commercial to begin with.
🔑 Revision block
- The release: 23 September 2026, MoSPI — findings of the Domestic Tourism Expenditure Survey (DTES), report titled 'Domestic Tourism in India'
- Conducted by: National Statistics Office (NSO), as part of the NSS 80th round, July 2025 to June 2026
- Three reference frames: overnight trips in last 365 days (holidaying/leisure; pilgrimage and religious; health and medical; shopping); overnight trips in last 30 days (business; social; education and training; others); same-day trips in last 30 days
- Why two windows: rare, memorable trips are recalled accurately over a year; frequent routine trips are not, so they are asked over 30 days
- 365-day window — trips per 100 tourist households: 127 rural (118 in 2014-15), 132 urban (121 in 2014-15)
- Largest share of overnight trips: pilgrimage and religious, 48 per cent, in both sectors
- Second largest: health and medical 38.4 per cent (rural); holidaying, leisure and recreation 36.4 per cent (urban)
- Highest expenditure category: health and medical — ₹29,454 rural, ₹41,649 urban
- Average trip size: 2.03 overnight visitors; about 80 per cent stayed five days or less
- Peak months for holidaying: May and October
- Mode: bus 32 per cent (rural), train 35 per cent (urban)
- Stay: hotels and guesthouses 36 per cent (urban); other non-commercial stays 28 per cent (rural)
- Destination share (365-day): Uttar Pradesh 15.7 per cent, Tamil Nadu 13.4 per cent, Rajasthan 8.0 per cent
- 30-day window: 113 rural / 111 urban per 100 tourist households; social 89 per cent; average trip size 1.95; about 45 per cent of visitor-trips 2-3 days; bus 48 per cent rural and 44 per cent urban; stays mainly with friends and relatives
- Destination share (30-day): Uttar Pradesh 15.5 per cent, Bihar 10.5 per cent, Tamil Nadu 9.6 per cent
- Highest average expenditure per trip: business, ₹5,949; by sector ₹5,179 rural and ₹6,934 urban
- Same-day trips: social 33 per cent, shopping 26 per cent — shopping had the highest expenditure share in both sectors
- Definitions: a visitor travels outside the usual environment for less than a year for any purpose other than employment there; a Tourism Satellite Account estimates tourism from the demand side
🎯 Practice MCQs
Q1. The Domestic Tourism Expenditure Survey was conducted as part of which NSS round? (a) 77th round (b) 78th round (c) 79th round (d) 80th round
→ (d) — between July 2025 and June 2026.
Q2. The largest share of overnight trips in the 365-day reference period was for: (a) Holidaying, leisure and recreation (b) Pilgrimage and religious purposes (c) Health and medical purposes (d) Shopping
→ (b) — 48 per cent, in both rural and urban India.
Q3. The second-largest share of overnight trips in rural areas was for: (a) Health and medical purposes (b) Holidaying, leisure and recreation (c) Business (d) Education and training
→ (a) — at 38.4 per cent, against leisure at 36.4 per cent in urban areas.
Q4. Which purpose recorded the highest average expenditure per trip in the 30-day window? (a) Social (b) Education and training (c) Business (d) Others
→ (c) — ₹5,949 on average.
Q5. The survey uses two different reference periods principally because: (a) Rural and urban households were surveyed separately (b) Rare and memorable trips are recalled reliably over a year, while frequent routine trips are not (c) Expenditure data take longer to compile (d) The sample size differed between purposes
→ (b)
Q6. Under standard definitions, a person travelling to another city for medical treatment is: (a) Not a visitor, because the purpose is not recreational (b) A visitor, since the definition covers travel outside the usual environment for any purpose other than employment there (c) A visitor only if the stay exceeds one year (d) Counted separately as a patient, not a traveller
→ (b) — which is why health and medical trips appear in a tourism survey.
Q7. Which state accounted for the highest share of total visitor-trips in the 365-day window? (a) Tamil Nadu (b) Rajasthan (c) Uttar Pradesh (d) Maharashtra
→ (c) — at 15.7 per cent, ahead of Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan.
Q8. A Tourism Satellite Account estimates tourism's economic contribution by: (a) Counting the turnover of registered travel agencies (b) Working from the demand side, identifying what visitors spent (c) Measuring hotel room occupancy nationally (d) Surveying only international arrivals
→ (b) — tourism is not a single supply-side industry.
Q9. For same-day trips, the highest share of expenditure in both rural and urban areas was on: (a) Social visits (b) Shopping (c) Education (d) Health and medical
→ (b) — even though social visits were the more frequent purpose.
Q10. Consider the following statements: 1. Most domestic travel in India generates substantial commercial accommodation demand. 2. The dominance of bus travel and stays with relatives limits the commercial multiplier from domestic tourism. Which is/are correct? (a) 1 only (b) 2 only (c) Both 1 and 2 (d) Neither 1 nor 2
→ (b) — the first is contradicted by the survey's own findings on mode and type of stay.
📋 How this gets asked (PYQ pattern)
Official statistics are one of the most reliably scoring areas in the CDS and OTA economy section, because the institutions are few and the vocabulary is precise.
The institution question asks who conducts what. MoSPI is the ministry; the NSO conducts surveys; the NSS rounds are how they are numbered; the CSO and NSSO were merged into the NSO. Candidates who cannot separate MoSPI from NSO from NSS lose marks on a question that requires no analysis at all.
The round question asks which NSS round produced a given survey. Recording the round number alongside the survey as you encounter it is the cheapest possible preparation.
The definitional question is the discriminating one here: what counts as a visitor, what the usual environment means, what a Tourism Satellite Account does. These have precise meanings that cannot be guessed from ordinary usage, and the medical-traveller case is exactly the kind of counter-intuitive application examiners like.
The findings question asks for the headline shares. Pilgrimage at 48 per cent is the number worth carrying, along with the rural-urban split in second place, because that contrast supports an argument rather than just filling a blank.
For the descriptive paper, the strongest use of this survey is as evidence against a common assumption. Tourism policy discussion in India is dominated by leisure and international arrivals; the data show domestic travel is overwhelmingly religious and substantially medical, undertaken by bus, and staying with relatives. An answer that names that gap between the policy conversation and the measured reality — and draws the infrastructure conclusion from it — is doing exactly what an economy paper asks for.
Preparing for CDS or OTA? Survey-based questions are won on vocabulary — reference period, usual environment, tourist household. Learn the definitions and the findings follow. Build the base with our CDS/OTA economy notes, follow the daily CDS/OTA current affairs, and prepare with our faculty in the upcoming Cavalier courses in Delhi.
✍️ Written by Hitendra Deswal — Economy & international relations faculty at The Cavalier. Reviewed by the Cavalier Faculty Desk.