8.46 Cr Tourism Jobs Need AI Personalization, Thomas Cook Exec Says

For AI engineers and product teams, India's travel market is a deployment challenge at population scale. With 428.55 crore domestic tourist visits in 2025, the industry must generate personalised itineraries, understand local-language intent and forecast demand across spending segments. Rajeev Kale's point that 'technology does not simply make travel easier' is a cue to move beyond basic automation toward preference-aware recommendation systems.

On September 27, 2026, India's Ministry of Tourism and the Tourism Satellite Account released World Tourism Day figures showing that tourism contributed 5.22 per cent to India's gross domestic product and supported 8.46 crore jobs in fiscal 2023-24. The employment figure is up from 6.94 crore in 2019-20, a gain of 1.52 crore jobs over four years. The accompanying narrative is clear: artificial intelligence and digital platforms are no longer peripheral to the sector, but are being treated as growth levers that can make travel more personalised and operationally scalable.

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The accompanying narrative is clear: artificial intelligence and digital platforms are no longer peripheral to the sector, but are being treated as growth levers that can make travel more personalised and operationally scalable.

The rebound is even more visible in visitor flows. Domestic tourist visits reached 428.55 crore in 2025, up from 67.7 crore in 2021, while foreign tourist visits rose from 0.1 crore to 2.53 crore over the same period. Tourism foreign exchange earnings climbed to ₹2,76,831 crore in 2025 from ₹63,978 crore in 2021, an increase of roughly 333 per cent. The scale is remarkable by any global benchmark: India is no longer simply an outbound travel market, but a massive domestic tourism economy where digital discovery, booking and payments must work at population scale. The government data also positions tourism as a substantial formal employment engine, which raises the political and policy stakes for reliable digital infrastructure in travel.

Rajeev Kale, President & Country Head – Holidays, MICE, Visa at Thomas Cook India, framed the opportunity around traveller expectations rather than raw volume. He said the future of tourism would be shaped not only by technology, but by how effectively companies use it to understand and respond to the evolving traveller. He identified a shift toward personalised, flexible and experience-led journeys, with growing interest in immersive experiences, wellness, spiritual tourism, adventure and premium travel. That marks an important segmentation shift: mass tourism volume is returning, but margin growth is likely to come from travellers who expect curated, context-aware experiences. Kale argued that digital innovation and AI can help companies understand preferences, simplify holiday planning and create more relevant products, while combining digital intelligence with human insight.

For software and AI providers, the data points translate into a broad enterprise demand signal. Travel operators, online travel agencies, hotels, tour operators and government tourism boards will need systems for dynamic pricing, customer data management, local-language search, itinerary generation, demand forecasting and payment reconciliation. The fact that the sector supports 8.46 crore jobs means that even modest productivity gains from AI-assisted planning, CRM automation or revenue management could have outsized economic impact. Companies that build travel-focused SaaS products may find India a useful proving ground because the market demands low-cost, mobile-first and multilingual solutions that can later be exported to other emerging economies.