More tourists visited TN but are these tourists happy?
Till the month of July in 2025, the number of foreign tourists who came to TN was 7.8lakhs and the number of domestic tourists was 203.5million. Unbelievable right!! Yes it`s true!!
This was mentioned by the Tourism minister Mr. R. Rajendran yesterday. However, there are few issues like crumbling infrastructure, poor facilities and underwhelming experiences in certain places in TN.
Why do so many tourists visit the state of Tamil Nadu?
The tourism minister later explained the various reasons why the state of TN has been attracting more tourists. He spoke about the TN diverse attractions from temples and hill stations to UNESCO listed monuments etc. This has resulted in superb revenue increase for TTDC. From Rs 49.11 cr in 2020-21 the revenue has now jumped to Rs 243.31 crores.
Bitter fact is that it was not a bed of roses for the tourists who visited TN. The tourists were unhappy regarding crowded hill towns, poor and unhygienic sanitary conditions, lack of trained guides etc.
It is worthy to note that Chennai was once projected as a global hub. The TTDC hotels in Chennai struggled to match up to the standards of private hotels but charged similar rates.
It was later brought to light by a retired tourism official that the charges of TTDC hotels in Mamallapuram were on par with that of private hotels but maintenance was poor. Not only that, the food served was not of high quality. He concluded that private players would do superbly if they were allowed to operate in a private-public partnership model.
According to another expert from the tourism industry, projects such as hop on hop off, tourist friendly autos and city tours etc were dropped. A regular tourist spoke about how there were only temple tours in Chennai and how apart from old sites like museums, beaches etc there was nothing new in Chennai. He was of the view that the potential of Chennai has been under utilised.
Bitter truth is that Tamil Nadu would lose its edge if visitor experiences don`t match with TN arrival figures.
