India has launched the National Digital Tourism Stack, an open digital public infrastructure project designed to bring tourism businesses, homestays and local experiences onto a shared digital ecosystem while reducing the fragmentation that currently separates travel discovery, verification, payments and booking. The Ministry of Tourism is developing the network with the Open Network for Digital Commerce and support from the International Centre for DPI Innovation and Advancement, with officials targeting 23,000 tourism experiences and homestays to become discoverable, trusted and bookable through participating platforms by the end of 2028.
Union Tourism Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat launched the initiative at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi during World Tourism Day celebrations alongside the National Mission for Alternative Destinations under Dekho Apna Desh 2.0. The two programmes are intended to work together: the digital stack is designed to improve access to tourism products, while the destination programme seeks to redirect visitor demand toward less crowded but tourism-ready locations. The Ministry also announced multiple industry partnerships intended to support promotion, digital outreach and responsible travel.
How will India’s National Digital Tourism Stack actually work for travellers and businesses?
The stack is intended to function as shared infrastructure rather than as another standalone travel-booking website. Tourism providers will be able to make products available across participating digital platforms instead of depending exclusively on one marketplace or building their own technology from scratch.
Capabilities envisaged by the Tourism Ministry include verified digital identities and supplier credentials, search and discovery tools, integrated payments, ratings and grievance redressal. That combination addresses a persistent problem in India’s fragmented tourism market, where small homestays, guides and experience providers may have limited online visibility or may be difficult for travellers to verify.
The ONDC model is particularly relevant because it is designed around interoperability. A tourism business connected to the network could theoretically be discoverable through multiple consumer applications, giving smaller providers more routes to customers while reducing dependence on a single dominant booking platform.
Why is the government targeting 23,000 experiences and homestays by the end of 2028?
The target provides a measurable benchmark for whether the infrastructure can move beyond a government technology launch into a functioning tourism marketplace. Officials want tens of thousands of smaller tourism offerings to become searchable and bookable through the network over the next two years.
Homestays and local experiences are particularly important because they can distribute tourism income more broadly than large hotels alone. A visitor booking a village stay, food experience, guide, craft workshop or local transport service can create spending across multiple small businesses.
Digitising such providers remains difficult because many lack professional websites, digital marketing budgets or standardised credentials. The new stack attempts to solve that problem by creating common infrastructure through which suppliers can establish trusted identities and connect to participating marketplaces.
How does Dekho Apna Desh 2.0 complement the new tourism digital stack?
Dekho Apna Desh 2.0 is designed to promote lesser-known destinations that already possess sufficient tourism infrastructure to accept more visitors. The objective is to reduce excessive concentration at famous destinations while directing more spending toward communities capable of supporting additional demand.
This matters because India’s most recognisable tourism centres face congestion, environmental pressure and seasonal overcrowding. Redirecting even a small share of domestic tourism toward alternatives can create additional revenue opportunities without requiring every destination to become a mass-tourism centre.
The digital stack provides the discovery mechanism needed to support that strategy. Travellers cannot easily choose lesser-known destinations if reliable information, accommodation, transport and experiences are difficult to find online.
How large is India’s tourism economy and why is digital infrastructure becoming more important?
The Tourism Ministry says travel and tourism contributed approximately 5.22% of India’s GDP in 2023-24 and supported about 8.46 crore jobs. Domestic tourist visits reached 428.55 crore in 2025, while foreign tourist visits rose to approximately 2.53 crore and tourism-related foreign-exchange earnings reached ₹2,76,831 crore.
Scale changes the technology requirement. A tourism system serving billions of domestic visits cannot rely solely on manual discovery, fragmented local listings and disconnected booking processes.
Digital public infrastructure can also improve formalisation. If smaller providers register credentials, receive digital payments and accumulate verifiable ratings, they can potentially gain easier access to customers, financing and insurance while governments obtain better visibility into the economic activity generated by tourism.
How does NIDHI+ already support the wider digital tourism ecosystem?
NIDHI+, the National Integrated Database of Hospitality Industry, already functions as a registration and classification platform for tourism providers. As of September 23, it listed 63,740 accommodation units, 54 convention centres, 215 food businesses, 1,450 online travel aggregators and 15,531 tourism service providers.
The Ministry says NIDHI+ supports end-to-end online processing, integrated payments and transparent approvals. Integrating that supplier database with the wider tourism stack could help distinguish verified operators from unregistered listings.
That trust layer may become one of the most commercially important elements of the project. Travellers choosing small or unfamiliar operators often worry about fraud, safety and service quality, while legitimate small businesses struggle to prove credibility against anonymous online competitors.
Where does artificial intelligence fit into India’s tourism strategy?
India has already integrated AI features into the revamped Incredible India Digital Platform, including personalised destination information, real-time weather updates and city exploration tools. The Tourism Ministry also signed an agreement with Google India in June covering digital promotion, traveller insights, capacity building and emerging technologies including AI.
AI could eventually make the tourism stack more useful by matching visitors with destinations and experiences based on budget, interests, location, season and available travel time. Smaller destinations could benefit if recommendation systems expose travellers to options they would not otherwise discover through conventional search.
The policy challenge will be ensuring that recommendations remain trustworthy and do not simply reproduce the visibility advantage already enjoyed by large commercial operators. Open infrastructure creates the possibility of broader participation, but platform design will determine whether smaller suppliers actually receive meaningful exposure.
What are the key takeaways from India’s National Digital Tourism Stack launch?
The initiative is more ambitious than creating another government tourism website. India is attempting to apply its digital public infrastructure model to a fragmented industry by creating interoperable building blocks for identity, discovery, payments, bookings, reviews and complaint handling.
The 23,000-provider target by 2028 gives the programme a measurable adoption goal. Its real success will depend on whether small tourism businesses find the network easy enough to join and whether consumer applications actually integrate the resulting inventory.
Dekho Apna Desh 2.0 adds a second economic objective by trying to distribute visitor spending beyond the country’s best-known tourism centres. Digital discovery and geographic diversification therefore sit at the centre of the same strategy.
Could India’s tourism stack replicate the impact of UPI or ONDC?
Tourism is structurally different from payments, so direct comparisons with UPI should be made cautiously. Booking a tourism experience involves quality, availability, cancellation rules, safety, reviews and customer service in ways that a simple financial transfer does not.
The opportunity nevertheless comes from a similar principle: create common digital rails and allow competing private and public applications to build on top of them. If that works, a small homestay or local guide could become visible across multiple platforms without negotiating individual commercial relationships with each one.
The next major test will therefore come from adoption rather than launch-day announcements. The platform will need enough verified suppliers, consumer applications and real transactions to create network effects. If those elements develop together, India could build a tourism marketplace where digital access becomes far less dependent on the size or marketing budget of the provider.
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