Recently, a tweet by X went viral. It was a newspaper job advertisement from 1979, congratulating Indians travelling abroad. The entrepreneur had been on business trips across Europe, including to the UK, West Germany and Switzerland.
In the decades before economic liberalization, it was not uncommon to see such advertisements in the popular newspapers of the time, featuring passport-sized photos of glamorously attired, avid travelers. After all, it is not every day that an Indian can travel abroad. In times when foreign currency was scarce, only the super-rich (mostly heirs of old business tycoons), senior government officials, bureaucrats, and those euphemistically called “import-exporters” (i.e. smugglers) crossed the border.
After 1991, economic reforms made international travel easier, and Indian tourists brought home photographs taken with Pentax zoom point-and-shoot cameras, posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, Niagara Falls and even the Bernese Highlands, where Raj and Simran of DDLJ fame fell in love and frolic.
As wealth and incomes have risen over the decades, at least at the top of the pyramid, wealthy Indian tourists are becoming pickier. For this elite, the Maldives, Bangkok and even the Swiss Alps are a thing of the past; they're moving to less predictable havens, from Svalbard to Fiji to St. Lucia. They crave experiences and the ultimate in luxury: instead of hotel rooms, they'll be happy with luxury villas, pools and personal butlers.
In addition to these high-spending tendencies, luxury tourists in India are also traveling with some very specific objectives in mind, one of which is sporting events.
This edition of Forbes India highlights some of the biggest international sporting events scheduled for the coming months, and Indians will be turning out in droves, starting with the ICC Men's T20 World Cup, followed by Euro 2024, Wimbledon 2024 and the Paris 2024 Olympics. Of course, there are also events that attract Indian tourists throughout the year, such as annual events like the Formula One Grand Prix Roadshow, which travels to exotic locations from Imola in Italy to Baku in Azerbaijan, and the recently concluded European football leagues.
As Forbes India contributing writer and roving journalist Anooti Vishal writes, global ultra-luxury hotels, top restaurants and boutique concierge services are doing their best to cater to the surge in Indians visiting big-ticket sporting events. Read Jet, Set, Go on page 50 to find out why more Indians are planning trips to coincide with sporting events, dining at Michelin-starred restaurants and stopping by the annual Chelsea Flower Show. Don't miss other articles in the package on luxury sports tourism, from the potential of sports tourism in India to the well-heeled travelling to luxury hotspots to improve their golf swing or tennis volley.
This week's fortnight's Forbes India cover features a man who has had a long and somewhat unusual journey since his initial encounter with the then-apparently arcane world of data centers in the early 2000s.
Sunil Gupta co-founded Yotta Data Services in 2019 after nearly two decades in the business of storing gigatonnes of data and running 19 third-party data centers. Suddenly, the pioneer found himself surrounded by India's largest conglomerates and the world's largest tech multinationals, all of whom were investing heavily in data storage. To learn more about Gupta's vision for Yotta and his bold bet to spend $1 billion to source Nvidia's most powerful semiconductor chips, Naandika Tripathi's “In Data Centres We Trust” is a must-read.
The best,
Brian Carvalho
Editor, Forbes India
Email: Brian.Carvalho@nw18.com
Twitter ID: Brian Ed
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