How temple tourism competes head on with beach tourism

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

India, you should ask — beaches and mountains or temples? Independent surveys have pegged the tourist footfall in Varanasi at an eight-fold increase as compared to Goa in 2022. A survey by ICICI Direct suggested that while Varanasi received 7.2 crore tourists in 2022, Goa was far behind with 85 lakh. In his Sunday's 'Mann Ki Baat', PM Modi said the tourist footfall in Varanasi has crossed 10 crore a year. Modi said that while Varanasi leads in footfall, other temple towns such as Ayodhya, Mathura and Ujjain are not far behind.

A boom in spiritual tourism is gathering strength in India. The Union tourism ministry data shows over 60% of tourism in India is in the religious and spiritual tourism category. Ministry data also suggests that economies surrounding places of worship in India raked in close to Rs 1.3 lakh crore in 2022, up from Rs 65,070 crore in 2021. In 2022 alone, India witnessed an astounding 1,433 million domestic tourists undertaking pilgrimages, while 6.64 million foreigners made their way to the country's sacred sites, ET has reported recently. Comparatively, the figures stood at 677 million domestic tourists and 1.05 million foreign visitors in 2021, showcasing a substantial increase in both categories. While many see the surge in spiritual tourism as an effect of pent-up demand from the pandemic, spiritual tourism had started growing much earlier. In 2017, SOTC became the first travel services provider to offer over 40 curated end-to-end itineraries covering 60 popular spiritual destinations in India. “Spiritual tourism is the single largest category in domestic tourism which is an untapped, fragmented opportunity,” Vishal Suri, managing director, SOTC Travel, had told ET then. In the same