While the Ram temple consecration ceremony is on at Ayodhya, the travel and tourism industry seems gearing up to latch on to a rising interest in spiritual tourism. According to MakeMYTrip, a leading online travel platform, it has “recorded a 97 per cent growth in searches for spiritual destinations on the platform, in the last two years (calendar year 2023 Vs calendar year 2021).” It also finds a departure from the past in terms of the profile of the audience. It finds an uptick in the interest from the younger audience as against it being largely restricted to older generation earlier.
It says, spiritual tourism, as a category has grown by 35 per cent in just over a year in the country, with a majority of this being fed by spirituals centres like Varanasi, Amritsar, Katra, Puri, Shirdi, Haridwar, and Tirupati. “This segment, while furnished by only 4 per cent of the total cities listed on our platform, contributes to over 12 per cent of overall transactions underscoring…