The classic holiday question used to be simple: where should I go? According to Skyscanner India's travel trends expert Neel Ghose, it has flipped. Travellers now start with what they want to do — eat a specific cuisine, attend a festival, explore heritage sites — and only then work backwards to a destination.
That shift is showing up in hard numbers. Skyscanner says just over half of Indian travellers arriving on its platform (51%) don't actually know where they want to travel. In response, the company has been rebuilding its tools around discovery rather than search. Its 'Explore Everywhere' feature lets someone flying out of Hyderabad, for example, pick a month and then compare destinations purely on airfare. Meanwhile, its conversational AI tools take loose inputs — an interest like cricket, say — and turn them into destination suggestions bundled with flight and hotel options.
Social media is the other big driver, especially for food and culture. Food bloggers on Instagram and YouTube are pushing experiences in front of travellers that they would never have typed into a search box. A reel of a street-food market or a festival procession can do the work a brochure once did — and often faster.
The context for all this is Skyscanner's 'India Culture Travel Index 2026', based on a survey of 2,000 people who travelled in the previous year, with Hyderabad respondents making up 17.5% of the sample. The findings were released alongside Ghose's remarks on how discovery and affordability remain the twin pillars of Indian travel planning.
Why does this matter if you're planning a trip? Because the practical playbook has changed. Instead of locking in a destination first, it's now easier than ever to start with your dates and budget and let prices lead you somewhere unexpected — particularly useful from Indian metros, where competition on routes can throw up surprisingly cheap fares. And if a video has planted an idea in your head, AI-powered search tools can help you test whether it's actually doable on your budget before you commit.
For travellers who feel overwhelmed by endless scrolling, the interest-first approach is a genuinely useful reframe: decide the experience, then let the tools find the place.
