California Tourism aims for Indian market to boost tourism growth

India holds a very important place for boosting tourism growth in California, says Caroline Beteta, the Visit California president and CEO. She said this during her visit to India for the first-ever CEO mission, which intends to develop relationship between the two countries and build enthusiasm around the Golden State’s commitment to the Indian market.

A delegation of 11 CEOs, headed by Caroline Beteta, visited India in November for its California tourism CEO mission in a bid to attract more and more Indian tourists and travellers to California. It is anticipated that leisure travel from India to California will grow by double digits in near future and the California tourism industry aims to understand the Indian consumer and travel landscapes.

Beteta said, “We are very excited for the opportunity that the Indian market presents for travel to California and see this mission as an important step in introducing California to Indian travellers. This visit will provide critical learning on how we can best prepare our state to welcome Indian visitors as the market continues to grow.”
The main objective of this mission was market education. In fact, from the Indian outbound travel market to the United States of America, California commands around 27.5 percent of the market share, which sums up that 3.19 lakh visitors have spent around 706 million dollars in the Golden State in 2016.


If we go by the forecasts, the number of tourists travelling to the Golden State will grow by 41 percent in the next five years, leading to 1 billion dollar spending by the year 2021; this will be on par with that of China over the past few years.

Visit California and the Producers Guild of India also formalised an MOU during this event. Both the bodies are optimistic that this co-operation will eventually promote tourism from India, help understand each other’s film production markets and also increase mutual cultural understanding.