Is Goa dying as India’s favourite beach escape?

“I generally like beach and scuba vacations,” he told Mint, asking not to be identified by more than his first name. Last month, he booked an impromptu trip to Thailand. The math was simple: return flights from Bengaluru to Krabi in southern Thailand were ₹17,000 only while a return ticket to Goa was ₹9,000 for the same dates. Hotel rooms with a jacuzzi and a view were only ₹7,500 a night, compared to ₹20,000 in Goa, and despite Phuket’s ‘taxi mafia’, there were plenty of cabs on aggregator apps such as Bolt and Grab.

“The total cost of the Thailand trip was about ₹90,000 per person. A similar trip in Goa would have been double the price, even with cheaper domestic tickets,” said Suyash. Adding insult to injury, he declared, “And obviously the beaches in Krabi are much more beautiful.”

Suyash isn’t planning a leisure trip to Goa anytime soon, even though he’s from the state and has family there.

Communications professional Bidya, in her late 30s, also ditched plans to take her family for a New Year’s Eve trip to Goa this year. She’s going to Sri Lanka instead.

“There is literally no cost difference between Sri Lanka and Goa even if you pick a more comfortable hotel or nicer flights,” Bidya said. “These costs add up when you’re going with your family. Also, gone are the days when travelling to a foreign country was inconvenient. Visas and other formalities are super easy in these countries.”

Since it was ‘discovered’ on the Hippie Trail in the 1970s, Goa has become synonymous with beaches, wellness, partying, and ‘good times’. A trip to Goa is an indispensable plot device in many contemporary Bollywood films and that Goa trip among friends that never materialises, an overused meme.

Yet, for the first time, Goa is seemingly in decline.

Indians complain incessantly about Goa’s prices while foreign traffic has dropped to a trickle. The tourist machinery—hotels, shacks, restaurants, and especially local taxis—is suffering a loss of reputation. Meanwhile, Thailand and the Philippines have begun offering visa-free entry while Indian airlines such as Indigo are operating more direct flights to those destinations.

So, what exactly is going wrong in Goa? How much of this decline is online noise and how much is real? Mint visited Goa and spoke to local businesses and others invested in the state’s tourism industry. What emerged is a complicated picture driven by a post-pandemic boom, a subsequent plateau, the rising cost of business, and a constant battle between locals and ‘outsiders’.

Oversupply and outsiders

First, the numbers. The two years of pandemic and lockdown were among the worst for Goa (and tourism worldwide). Once the lockdown was lifted, Goa was inundated with domestic tourists. In 2022, the country’s consumer economy boomed, thanks to ‘revenge spending’ by rich Indians who had held on to their wealth and their jobs while covid ravaged all else.

Tourists are still flocking to the state. Domestic footfalls more than doubled in FY23 to nearly 7.6 million arrivals while international traffic grew more than 8x to nearly 300,000 arrivals. Already, in the first half of 2025, Goa has received a record-breaking 5.4 million domestic tourists and nearly 300,000 international arrivals, the state government said. But, the arrival of foreign tourists, who bring in precious foreign exchange, remains well below the pre-pandemic high of 900,000-1 million a year.

And while domestic inflows are up, they have not kept pace with the post-pandemic surge, which has prompted many to invest in stays and other businesses catering to tourism. Consequently, there is excess supply despite the demand, diminishing returns for those in the business.

Government data shows just how much supply of registered hotels and stays has increased. As of FY24, Goa had nearly doubled the number of hotels and lodges from pre-pandemic levels. If informal, unregistered stays were to be taken into account, the increase would be far higher.

Since the pandemic, there has been a boom in Goan real estate, particularly villas doubling as vacation rentals.

In 2024, prices of villas in North Goa rose 16% in just one year, real estate consulting firm Savills said in a report last year. Savills estimated that the villa prices will continue rising in this year, at 10-15%, as more rich Indians look for a second home. The company added that more than 20 hotels with over 7,000 rooms are expected to come up in North Goa as GMR opens a Delhi-like Aerocity near the Mopa airport while developers such as Eldeco and DLF come up with high-end apartments and luxury villas in the surrounding region.

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Local hostel and homestay owners say much of the money in this business is flowing in from outside the state, particularly the rich from Delhi and Mumbai. The result: home and land rates are rising, pricing out locals, and increasing the supply of lodging for tourists flocking to the state.

“Over the years, the kind of hospitality infrastructure that used to exist—predominantly hotels and guest houses—has now changed to hostels, villas, B&Bs,” Pranav Dangi, founder and CEO of budget hostel chain Hosteller, said. “The supply has increased over the years by leaps and bounds. The demand has not decreased.”

“Business is terrible,” said the local owner of a hostel in Calangute, North Goa, requesting anonymity. She has been running the property since the mid-1990s and for years catered to price-conscious foreign tourists. “Last year, tourist footfalls were perhaps 10% of what they usually are in the peak season. I had rooms empty and available on new year’s eve. That has never happened to me in all these years.”

But, these pandemic-era owners of pricey villas are renting out to tourists and are unwilling to drop room rates. As a result, Goa is facing a unique problem: too much supply, without much of a drop in prices.

“The expectations of the [villa] owners is still sky high,” said Deven Parulekar, founder of luxury villa rental aggregator SaffronStays. “The expectations are still in tandem with 2021, when demand was very high and supply was very short.”

Prices and the ‘Mafia’

Much of the grumbling around Goa begins with airfares and taxis. Yet, analysts say demand for domestic flights is still growing while online travel agencies add that people are continuing to fly to Goa despite the seemingly high rates.

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“Domestic demand remains resilient, with Jan-Jun’25 traffic up 7% year-on-year, supported by leisure and a steady return of business travel,” brokerage Centrum said in a sector note this August. “Elevated last-minute fares could trim discretionary trips at the margin, while per-km pricing on some international routes is lower than domestic, nudging a portion of leisure traffic overseas,” it said, adding that domestic passenger traffic was set to grow by 7-10% this fiscal year, then settle at a lower 6-8% annual growth rate.

Online travel aggregators, too, say despite high fares, the demand for flights to Goa is unaffected.

“Travel demand to Goa is rising steadily, with flight bookings showing a year-on-year increase of 23% in 2024 and a 34% uptick in 2025,” Aloke Bajpai, group CEO of ixigo, told Mint in an emailed statement, adding that many more first-time travellers from tier-II and tier-III cities were coming to Goa. “Demand remains strong, especially among budget and mid-segment travellers discovering Goa for the first time or returning after a long gap.”

Besides, he added, incoming traffic to Goa is now 80-90% domestic travellers from states such as Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat. High-end hotels are getting brisk business from wedding parties, especially in South Goa, locals said.

Goa government data bears it out—foreign tourist arrivals last year were less than half of the pre-pandemic peak. In the streets of North Goa, taxi drivers, hotel owners, even those running smaller stalls routinely complain about the lack of ‘charters’ this year—special flights from foreign cities with high-spending tourists.

In the streets of north Goa, taxi drivers, hotel owners, even those running smaller stalls routinely complain about the lack of ‘charters’ this year—special flights from foreign cities with high-spending tourists.

Meanwhile, domestic tourists continue to complain of a taxi ‘mafia’ as unions set prices for popular routes and demarcate territories among themselves. At North Goa’s Mopa airport, signboards and pillars clearly direct tourists to pick up points for buses and various legal taxi services.

“See ma’am, the fare is ₹1,272 and only ₹900 will go to the driver,” one lady staffing the Blue Cab Prepaid Taxi Association’s counter at Mopa told this writer, for a ride to Calangute. “The rest is all airport charges.”

There is an urgent emphasis on transparency everywhere: large boards by the sidewalks warn tourists that touts are illegal and to stay away from agents promising a cheaper taxi or other amenities.

While unions are protecting their members and are gunning for transparency, life is tough for drivers who aren’t part of any union.

“I settled in Goa 15 years ago from Maharashtra, I speak Konkani, and I have an all-India taxi permit,” said a cab driver from North Goa who drove this writer to Dabolim, the older, South Goa airport. “But I am not a member of any taxi union. I do not have a billa (badge) from Goa state. That should not matter, but I am routinely stopped for ‘checking’ by Goa police who ask me for ₹10,000 in fines, saying I am an outsider.”

The driver moved to Goa with his family in 2014. “There was unbelievable business in Goa then,” he says wistfully. “It is slow now.”

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Old shacks, new cafes

Nothing exemplifies the Goa Tourist experience more than the beach shacks that come up just before the peak season begins. Goa’s shack business is highly regulated, and operators must apply to renew their licence periodically.

And so, shack owners are an unhappy lot. Licence costs are going up, along with food and rent prices. Touts often approach customers at shacks offering illicit drugs and other services. And owners say their biggest grouse is the surge of ‘outsiders’ in the shacks business.

“There should be a proper policy for everything,” Cruz Cardozo, president of the 320-member strong Shack Owners Welfare Society, said. He has been running a shack in Cavelossim, South Goa, since the 1990s. “The licences are not given on time. Last year, shack owners got the licence to start building on beaches only in October,” he added. “We have always maintained that they should be released in August so there is time to prepare before the peak season.”

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License costs have doubled in the last five years, Cardozo claims. What’s more, he says, many local licence owners are “subletting”, allowing people from outside Goa to run beach shacks.

“I think about 20% of all shacks in Goa are being run by the Delhi-types,” he said, invoking the same outsider refrain that other business owners bring up across Goa. “They don’t know how to run a shack as well as locals, so the experience is affected. Then you see these YouTubers make videos about how Goa is finished, and how expensive it is; how difficult it is to travel here.”

A common refrain among old-timers in Goa is how much harm ‘YouTubers’ and travel vloggers have caused to Goa.

“YouTubers have become a problem,” said Kamal Verma, master chef and owner of several restaurants in Goa since the 1990s, adding that they often promote South East Asian countries nowadays. “We need to attract premium Indian tourists. Already, the Arabs, the Scandinavians, Israelis, and Russians are not coming because of war.”

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There is, however, one thriving centre in this otherwise complicated push-and-pull between the oversupply of tourist amenities and the battle between Goans and the ‘outsiders’: Panaji.

Restaurants and upscale cafes are exploding in Goa’s capital city and its fancy suburbs such as Dona Paula, prompting both locals and outsiders to invest.

“Panjim is exploding,” Parvesh Debuka, founder of Breakaway cafe and pizzeria, told Mint, using the city’s earlier name. He moved to Goa five years ago after quitting his job in a tech startup in Bengaluru.

“The Windmills guys [brewery in Bengaluru] are here, Great State Ale Works is selling here. The locals here are rich. And people have moved here from Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Pune—all well-to-do folks in their ‘50s and ‘60s looking for a good life. I cater to the affluent of Dona Paula.”

Debuka started his cafe in January, and says he has broken even in seven months. Besides, he adds, many more people are encouraged to open cafes, restaurants, and other local businesses priced at a premium for long-term residents of the area. Unlike North Goa, most villa and apartment owners here live in Goa for much of the year, rather than renting out to tourists.

And so, the Goa loyalists remain. Perhaps the state is changing, from a must-see tourist haven to a destination for a more discerning traveller who likes Goa for what it is, not for regulars looking for any place with beaches and sunshine.

“In Goa, you actually see lesser ‘tourists’ in that sense and more real ‘travellers’, said Girish Mallya, a Mumbai-based media business founder. He visits Goa regularly for marathons and fitness-focused trips, usually with friends. “Even among the budget and premium travellers, there are fewer touristy ones who like to come in busloads. So I experience more Goa now than I did earlier during the tourist boom.”