The India Story at Skift Global Forum

Three days at Skift Global Forum and a few dozen conversations on stage later, India kept coming up in some of the most interesting ones.

It was the single biggest growth bet made by a hotel CEO on the main stage. Accor CEO Sebastien Bazin said the group expects to have more hotels in India than in France within a decade. More interesting was his emphasis on the partnership with InterGlobe, a recognition that while India is an increasingly important market, having the right local partner matters.

Then there was India in a very different conversation. Our very own MasterChef Vikas Khanna spoke passionately about how India, and countries like it, need to tell their own tourism stories rather than constantly measure themselves against a Western template.

India doesn’t need to compare itself with Paris or London, he argued. Its strength is its own food, culture, depth and craftsmanship. His story about making yogurt kebabs, with their notoriously low success rate, was a wonderfully human reminder that some things simply cannot be replicated by an algorithm.

And perhaps that was the most interesting contrast at this year’s Forum. AI dominated so many conversations about the future of travel. But the India story, to me, felt refreshingly tangible. It was about building hotels, finding the right partners and, increasingly, having the confidence to tell India’s story on its own terms.

That, to me, was the real India takeaway from Skift Global Forum. The opportunity is enormous. But capturing it will take more than capital or technology. It will take local knowledge, the right partnerships and, perhaps most importantly, confidence in what India already has.