1. India Outbound Travel Trends 2025–2026
The growth of India outbound to Vietnam DMC market isn’t a recent story, but the pace of that growth in the last two years has been striking enough that even people who’ve been watching the market for a long time are taking notice.
To understand what’s happening with Indian travelers coming to Vietnam specifically, it helps to start one level up and look at where India sits in the bigger picture of Asia-Pacific travel.
1.1. India as the Biggest Outbound Driver in Asia-Pacific
Source: UN Tourism Report — Asia and the Pacific (Amadeus data, March 2024 – February 2025)
According to the UN Tourism Regional Report on Asia and the Pacific, which draws on Amadeus booking and search data, India is currently the single largest outbound source market into the Asia-Pacific region. It leads both in search volume and in actual bookings, with outbound growth running at around 13% year-on-year. That’s a meaningful number on its own, but what makes it significant is the context: this is not a spike, it is a consistent upward trend supported by structural factors.
The core driver is the expansion of India’s middle class. As more households reach the income level where international travel becomes achievable, the pool of potential outbound travelers grows, not just for this year, but for the years ahead. This is what makes India different from markets that recover fast after a disruption but plateau quickly. The demand base here is widening structurally, not just bouncing back cyclically.
The UN Tourism data doesn’t break down India-to-Vietnam flows specifically, but it does establish clearly that India is a stable, growing, and strategically important source market for the entire Asia-Pacific region, including Vietnam. And when you overlay that with Vietnam’s own performance data, the picture becomes very clear.
On the Vietnam side, the report records the country as one of the fastest-growing inbound markets in the region, with search volume up 66% and actual arrivals up 31%. Phu Quoc alone saw search volume grow 119% and bookings grow 101%. These numbers don’t exist in isolation — they are partly driven by exactly the kind of new-market interest that India represents.
1.2. India Outbound to Vietnam DMC
When you move from the regional overview to the actual arrival numbers for Vietnam, the scale of the shift becomes striking.
Nearly 656,000 Indian arrivals were already recorded in just the first 11 months of 2025, suggesting the full-year number stayed strong through December. The three-year compound growth has taken this market from a relatively minor source to one of the most significant and fastest-moving in Vietnam’s inbound mix.
Looking ahead to 2026, forecasts suggest Vietnam could become the top Southeast Asian destination for Indian travelers in some segments, including affordable family travel, beach holidays, and cultural experiences. The combination of reasonable prices, a sense of safety, and a genuinely varied product offering (Phu Quoc for beach, Sa Pa for mountains, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City for urban culture, Hoi An for heritage) gives Vietnam a broad appeal that few destinations in the region can match at its price point.
Three structural factors underpin this. First, the expanding Indian middle class and rising appetite for short regional trips. Second, rapidly improving direct flight connectivity from multiple Indian cities. Third, Vietnam’s positioning as a credible alternative, or complement, to Thailand and Bali, with lower crowd density at many sites and strong value for money.
2. Vietnam’s Travel Market in 2025–2026
Given how fast Indian arrivals are growing, a reasonable question follows: does Vietnam have the foundation to actually absorb and sustain this kind of growth? Based on what we’ve seen, the answer is yes, but with important caveats about what still needs to develop.
Vietnam recorded approximately 21.2 million international arrivals in 2025, up about 22% year-on-year, well above the global average of around 5%. That’s not just recovery from the pandemic dip; it’s genuine market expansion. Revenue from both domestic and international tourism grew strongly alongside the volume numbers, which matters because it suggests quality is improving alongside quantity, not just raw headcounts.
The target for 2026 is 25 million international arrivals, ambitious but credible given the current trajectory. Asia accounts for more than 70% of Vietnam’s inbound visitors, with Southeast Asian markets leading. But the interesting growth is coming from what the industry calls secondary markets: India, Russia, the Philippines, smaller in absolute terms but growing fast from a low base and with strong long-term potential.
The most popular destinations among Indian visitors reflect the breadth of what Vietnam offers: Phu Quoc for island relaxation, Da Nang and Hoi An for beach and heritage, Ha Noi with Ha Long Bay and Ho Chi Minh City for urban experiences and MICE programs, Sa Pa for something completely different. Family travel is the dominant segment, followed by MICE and leisure groups.
But there are real structural gaps that still need attention. Direct flight capacity, while improving, is still not enough to make travel as seamless as it could be from all Indian cities. The range of tour products genuinely designed for Indian preferences, vegetarian and Jain meal options, family-format itineraries, spiritual and cultural experiences, is still catching up to demand. And as volume grows fast at some destinations, the pressure on sustainable management is becoming more visible.
The market is there. What’s still developing is the ecosystem to serve it properly, and that’s where the real opportunity lies for operators who are willing to build the capability rather than just ride the wave. |
3. Phan Van DMC and Indian Travel
I want to be honest about something: when we started working with Indian travel agencies, we thought the transition would be more straightforward than it turned out to be. We had been running tours in Vietnam for over 20 years. We had the vehicles, the supplier network, the operational team. What we quickly realized was that all of that experience did not automatically translate into knowing how to serve Indian groups well. We had to rebuild parts of our operation from scratch, and some of the lessons came from getting things wrong first.
3.1. How We Started Working With Indian Outbound Agencies
We work primarily in a B2B model. We don’t sell directly to Indian tourists, we work with Indian outbound travel agencies who bring us the tour program and trust us to run everything on the ground in Vietnam. That means the full responsibility for the on-ground experience sits with us: the itinerary execution, the hotel coordination, the restaurant selection, the guide and driver management, and every situation that comes up unexpectedly along the way.
The first Indian groups we worked with were larger than what we were used to with European or East Asian clients. Groups of 40 to 60 people, multi-day programs covering multiple cities, tight schedules with a lot of moving parts. The volume of coordination required was at a different level entirely, and it exposed weaknesses in our setup that we hadn’t seen clearly before.
3.2. The Challenges When Working with Indian Tourism
I want to go through these honestly, because I think they reflect something true about what it takes to serve this market well, and why not every DMC that claims to handle Indian groups actually does it reliably.
Food Requirements That Cannot Be Compromised
For many Indian travelers, especially those who are vegetarian or follow Jain dietary rules, food is not a preference, it is a requirement. Getting this wrong doesn’t just create a bad meal; it creates a genuinely uncomfortable and sometimes deeply upsetting experience for the traveler. In our early days of working with Indian groups, we learned this the hard way at a couple of restaurants that we thought could accommodate the request but couldn’t do it properly. We had to build a completely separate network of restaurants: local Vietnamese restaurants that genuinely understand how to prepare vegetarian food to the standard Indian vegetarian travelers expect, and Indian restaurants with actual Indian chefs in the major cities. That took time, trial and error, and in a few cases, embarrassing situations we had to resolve on the spot. Now it’s a fixed part of our planning, food logistics are treated as non-negotiable, not as something we figure out on the day. |
Large Groups Move Differently Than Small Ones
This sounds obvious, but the operational reality of managing a group of 50 people through a multi-day Vietnam itinerary is genuinely different from managing a group of 12. The time it takes to gather everyone, the pace of movement between sites, the number of vehicles required, the way meals need to be pre-coordinated, everything multiplies in complexity. In the early days, we built itineraries the same way we would for smaller groups and then were surprised when timing consistently slipped. We had to learn to build realistic buffers, plan ahead for every bottleneck, and have contingency options ready for every part of the day. One delayed bus connection or one restaurant that wasn’t ready on time would cascade through the rest of the schedule. We experienced that cascade more than once before we redesigned how we plan for large Indian groups. |
A Chain of Suppliers Is Only as Strong as Its Weakest Link
When a tour program involves hotels, restaurants, vehicles, local guides, attraction tickets, and multiple cities across several days, you are managing a chain with many potential failure points. Early on, we relied on coordinating separate suppliers for different parts of the program, and we found that a small problem with any one of them could create a much bigger problem for the group. A hotel that wasn’t ready for an early check-in. A restaurant that had overbooked. A guide who misunderstood the timing. These things happen in any tour operation, but when they happen in the middle of a large Indian group’s program, the impact is amplified. The solution wasn’t to find perfect suppliers, it was to centralize the coordination so that we had one clear point of control, could see problems early, and had backup options ready. That required rebuilding how we manage information flow across our team, not just which suppliers we use. |
Cultural Fit Goes Deeper Than You Expect
This was perhaps the hardest lesson to learn, because it’s not something you can fix with a process or a checklist. The communication style, the warmth of interaction, the flexibility in response to requests mid-trip, these things matter enormously to Indian travelers, and they are shaped by culture in ways that are easy to underestimate from the outside. A guide who is excellent with European groups, precise, information-focused, structured, may create friction with an Indian family group that wants more conversational engagement, more humor, more willingness to adapt when someone asks an unexpected question or wants to extend time at a particular stop. We had to rethink how we select and train guides for Indian groups specifically, and to be honest, we are still refining this. It is ongoing work, not something you solve once and move on from. |
3.3. Building Tour Packages for India Group Tours
Going through those challenges forced us to restructure how we work with Indian groups — not at the surface level, but at the level of how we actually organize the whole operation. Here is what that looks like in practice now:
We design and run the full program as one integrated system, not as a collection of separate bookings. Every service element — hotels, transport, restaurants, guide, tickets — is coordinated centrally by our team, so we always have a complete picture of where things stand and can respond quickly when something needs to change.
Food is planned before anything else. For every Indian group, we map out the full meal plan before we confirm the rest of the itinerary. We work with a curated network of restaurants that we have tested and trust — including local Vietnamese restaurants that cook vegetarian food properly, and Indian restaurants with Indian chefs in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Da Nang.
We design cultural experiences into the itinerary, not just sightseeing stops. For Indian groups specifically, this means including visits to traditional craft villages, local markets, and hands-on food experiences, things that create genuine interaction with Vietnamese culture, not just a list of famous sites to photograph and move on from.
Our guides and drivers for Indian groups are specifically selected and briefed on the cultural context, the communication style, and the specific expectations of the group. We don’t assign a guide based purely on availability.
We handle everything that comes up in real time. When a flight is delayed, when a hotel room isn’t ready, when a restaurant is unexpectedly closed, we have someone on the ground who can resolve it without the group experiencing chaos. That sounds basic, but it requires having the right relationships and the right team structure to actually do it consistently.
At the moment, we handle around 100 to 150 Indian travelers per month through our fixed B2B partner network. That’s not a massive number in the context of the total market, but it represents a consistent, reliable operation — not boom-and-bust volume that we can’t actually serve well. Every one of those travelers moves through a system we have deliberately built and refined over time, not through an improvised arrangement.
