While people feared travelling to other countries before because of the lack of passport identification and VISA approval, things are changing up constantly over the course of time. More and more form of e-VISAs is opening up along with the opportunities of VISA on arrival. This has been on a steady rise and all for the right reasons.

The use of traditional VISAs is constantly declining as per the reports suggested by United Nations World Tourism Organisation in the World Tourism Highlights, 2019.

In the released report, it suggested saying that the share of world population that needed the traditional form of VISA for international travelling have declined drastically from 75% in 1980 to 53% in the year of 2018. This is pretty much a rapid decline that you possibly didn’t even think of realize was happening.

The rapid decline in the bout of decline clearly indicates that more and more countries are making it easier for the people to acquire VISA and getting easier access to travelling.

In relation to these changes, even India has kept up with these global trends and has walked through that extra mile to bring forth changes to their VISA policy to attract more of the foreign travelers to the country. The country now does offer e-VISA as well as VISA free access to the travelers from across 166 countries around the world.

It was also announced in August that the government is going to introduce more of the flexible e-VISA for the tourists with higher fee during the peak seasons from July to March. The travel fees for the VISA charges will be quite lean during the off season during the months of April to June.

It is not just the ease of the e-VISA and the access that has been highlight in the United Nations World Tourism Organisation in the World Tourism Highlights but a few other factors as well. According to the report, it is also suggested that the inclusion of the digital technology is also further shaping up the overall traveler experience even more.

Artificial intelligence is taking a front seat in this, completely transforming the tourism to helping the travelers tourists with a completely personalized experience in terms of the travel diaries all through.

If the statistics are to be believed, it was Asia and the Pacific which experienced the highest growth in the arrivals in 2018. Apart from that, Europe accounted for half of the world’s tourist travels which was later found to be around 40% of the total tourism receipts on a global scale.

When it comes round to the Asian tourism reports, it was found that the majority of it was governed by south-Asia with a rapid growth in double digits in Iran, Sri Lanka, India as well as Nepal.

The World Tourism Highlights do provide with an overview of the international tourism trends that have been noted in 2019. The reports suggest that in comparison to 2018, there have been subsequent GDP curves. With the flexibility with the e-VISA and the easier tourism plans, the same does make it a lot easier to manage around without any issues as such.

By Somapika Dutta