PATTAYA, Thailand – The Indian phenomenon in Pattaya is well known by now. The “new” Walking Street has a whole section devoted mostly to Indian-style entertainment venues, although the luxuriously upmarket and heavily marketed Jalwa night and dance club has been turned into a late-hours drinking establishment. That’s according to Stickman’s weekly internet blog.
There are at least 80 Indian restaurants in the Pattaya area, although they are mostly concentrated on the Second Road district with a cuisine doubtless geared to the international market in general rather than to the home country in particular. Not to be overlooked is that Pattaya has a long-established Indian and Hindu community with several restaurants which date back to the 1980s, amongst them Ali Baba and Layla.
Thailand attracted over two million Indian tourists in 2024, although Japan welcomed slightly more. Pattaya City Hall estimates that 700,000 Indians visited the resort last year, encouraged by Thailand’s visa-exempt policy which, however, does not extend to Pakistan and Bangladesh whose citizens still need a prior tourist visa before travelling. Research via Agoda suggests that an increasing number of Indians are now vacationing abroad twice a year.
Indians are currently the eight largest global tourist spenders and, according to Booking.com, will be the fourth from the top in the league table by 2030. A third of Indians are already designated middle-class (many retailers and business people) with that number set double within the next few years. Thailand is usually placed fourth or fifth in the list of countries most favored by Indian tourists, but the data is complicated. For example, neighboring Sri Lanka claims to be number one for actual arrivals as does the United States. However, numbers in America are distorted by the large number of Indian students there.
Several of Thailand’s tourism rivals in south east Asia are keen to join the expansion. An original top-of-the-range Disney Cruise Line seaborne vacation, based on Singapore, created fantastic interest in Delhi even though the sailing date isn’t until December 2025. Regional flights to and from India doubled last year, especially as direct flights from an increasing number of Indian cities are becoming possible. Later this year, Cambodia will open Phnom Penh’s new high-tech airport which will be the largest in the world and able to accommodate the largest airplanes.
Malaysia has copied Thailand in admitting Indians visa-free, but only for 30 days, and Indonesia has a straightforward visa on arrival immigration system. Vietnam, which welcome half a million Indians last year, has an e-visa in place which is valid for 90 days. The Philippines is working on a visa waiver program to improve its 2024 total of 80,000 Indians taking a vacation there. Given the current trend for many Chinese to prefer to take domestic holidays, the pressure to attract more and more Indians will be a dominant theme in south east Asia throughout 2025. Not to mention beyond.
