NEW DELHI: Uncle Sam expects visitors from India to continue growing at the fastest rate till the end of this decade — as it has seen happen post Covid. The US government’s National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) has forecast visitors from India will more than double at 201% from 2019’s 14.7 lakh in 2029, as against an average of 122% for rest of the world with Italy being the second fastest at 131%. Overall, international visitors to America are expected to increase to almost 10 crore in 2029, up from the 2019 figure of 7.9 crore.
The US has so far seen visitors from only two countries surpass pre-pandemic levels — India and Italy. “Helped by a strong economy, visitation from India has increased 552% since 2020 to 22 lakh in 2024 and India has become the fourth largest US inbound travel market. This strong growth will continue over the next few years. India visitation is expected to be more than double that of the 2019 level by 2029,” a NTTO document says.
Going ahead, the NTTO forecasts India to see the highest growth over 2019 visitors. “For India, one of the fastest growing countries since the pandemic, arrivals to the United States already exceeded the pre-pandemic level by almost 50% in 2024. Although visitation from all Asian countries included in the forecast increased significantly in 2024, China and Japan were still roughly halfway back to their pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, arrivals from South Korea reached three quarters of its 2019 level,” the document says.
The NTTO forecast covers the top inbound markets for the US that include Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, Italy, UK, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Brazil. Visitation from these countries accounted for 78% of total US international inbound arrivals in 2024. The US has classified these top markets under three heads: Those which surpassed pre-pandemic levels in 2024 (India and Italy); those that will do so in 2026 (Germany, France, Canada, Brazil, and Mexico) and those that will be fully recovered in 2027 and later (Australia, China, South Korea, UK and Japan).
While India-US travel is rouching new highs post Covid, the travel industry says it remains way below potential due to two factors — long visa interview wait times and few direct flights due to US airlines not using Russian airspace. A record number of Indians travelled to the US last calendar year, more than CY 2023’s figure of 17.6 lakh which had overtaken the pre-Covid 2019 high of 14.7 lakh. India is now the second largest overseas source market of international visitors to the US, after the UK.
The waiting period for B1/B2 interview is currently 407 days in Chennai; 156 in Delhi; 151 in Mumbai; 140 in Hyderabad and 114 in Kolkata, according to the US state department website.
