Urban travellers prefer hotels, rural dharamshalas

New Delhi: Most urban travellers opt for hotels, guesthouses or house rentals for their stay for an overnight domestic trip, while dharamshalas remain the top place of stay for those from rural India.A part of the reason may have to do with the fact that over three-fourths of Indians who travelled in the past year and only a third of the households went on these overnight trips, did so for medical or pilgrimage purposes. And, they still didn’t spend much on travel: The average spend works out to Rs 16,420 (urban) and Rs 15,560 (rural) with nearly 64% trips lasting only up to three nights, findings from the latest domestic tourism survey by NSO showed. Usually, these travellers are accompanied by just one companion.The latest survey conducted during July 2025-June 2026 defined an overnight trip as movement to destination for a duration of not less than 12 hours (including the midnight hours) for two consecutive calendar days and of not more than 180 days and it noted that frequency of domestic travel has increased in the past decade, compared to the last such survey in 2014-15.For every 100 tourist households, there are 127 trips now in rural areas, up from 118 in 2014-15. Urban areas recorded 132 trips compared with 121 earlier. While 22% Indian households went for a holiday or leisure trip, with May and Oct being the peak months, only 12.5% of rural tourist households undertook such trip as compared to 36.4% in urban areas in the past year.Data also showed that more than 95% of the religious and leisure trips are self-financed, with no govt or any other institutional reimbursement option available to travellers, while 8% overnight trips undertaken for health and medical purposes were reimbursed by govt.With regards to mode of transport used by the travellers, bus remains the primary mode of transport in rural areas (32%), while train (35%) remains the preferred mode for urban travellers. As a share of expenditure on trip components, people spent most on transport, both in rural and urban areas (nearly 35%), while going on religious or leisure trips. In case of medical trips, expenses on medicine were the biggest component (nearly 75%).The survey also measured the share of households who undertook overnight trips in the past month. Social trips (89%) accounted for the maximum share among these kinds of trips, with nearly 80% of the trips lasting less than three days.