– by Dr. Sourya Rongala, Assistant Professor, Paari School of Business. SRM University-AP.
There’s a waterfall in Meghalaya that barely anyone knew about three years ago. Today, it has a parking lot, a chai stall, and roughly 800 visitors on a Sunday. No government campaign drove them there. No travel magazine feature. Just a reel of 28 seconds,trending audio, 4.2 million views.
This is the new tourism funnel, and it’s moving faster than any destination can handle.
When the Algorithm Becomes the Tour Operator
Reels and Shorts have fundamentally changed how Indians travel. The discovery phase which was once dominated by blogs, guidebooks, and word-of-mouth, now happens in a doomscroll at 11 PM. Someone posts a golden-hour video from Spiti Valley. It racks up shares. By morning, a thousand people have added it to their travel buckets. By next weekend, some of them are already there. The speed is the problem.
Traditional tourism grew gradually. Local infrastructure comprising roads, waste management, homestays, water supply — had time to catch up. Today, a single viral reel can flood a village with visitors before the locals even realize what’s happening. Kasol went from quiet riverside hamlet to party destination in what felt like a blink. Rishikesh’s quieter ghats are getting harder to find. And the Andamans? Ask any marine biologist what’s happened to the coral near Havelock.
The Creators Aren’t Villains — But the Format Is Doing the Damage
It’s easy to blame the influencers. But most of them are just doing what the platform rewards: beautiful visuals, aspirational framing, frictionless inspiration. Nobody films the overflowing trash bins just outside the frame. Nobody tags the video with “also, the locals here are exhausted.”
The 30-second format is structurally incapable of communicating nuance. You can’t reel-iffy “please don’t visit during monsoon season” or “this trail requires a permit and physical fitness.” What gets compressed into those seconds is only the highlights, the waterfall, the sunset, the “untouched” landscape. The responsibility that should come with that image gets lefts behind.
And the comments section does the rest. “Drop location?” appears within minutes. Someone obliges. The coordinates spread. The crowds follow.
India Has the Scale to Make This Especially Brutal
Most over-tourism conversations happen around European cities like Venice, Dubrovnik, Santorini. But India’s version of this problem is uniquely complex. Many of the destinations going viral are ecologically fragile (the Northeast, Himalayan villages, island ecosystems) or culturally sensitive (tribal regions, ancient temple towns). They often lack the infrastructure backbone that European destinations have built over centuries.
When Ziro Festival in Arunachal Pradesh blew up on reels, it was celebrated as a win for Northeast tourism. And in some ways, it was. But the flip side is overcrowding, waste, cultural commodification, arrived right alongside the attention.
So, What Actually Changes Things?
Regulation is part of the answer, enforcing entry caps, permit systems, seasonal access restrictions can help a lot. Some states are already moving in this direction, but slowly.
But the bigger shift needs to happen in the culture of content creation itself. A growing number of creators are starting to hold back location tags on sensitive spots, spread the hype across multiple destinations, or actively post about responsible travel practices. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.
Platforms have a role too. If the algorithm can learn to recommend a reel, it can learn to attach a responsible tourism advisory to one.
The irony is that the same reels that are straining these places are also the most powerful tools that can be used to change behaviour. The question is whether we’ll use that power before the waterfall everyone came to see runs dry — or gets fenced off entirely.
The 30-second clip made us want to go. Maybe the next 30 seconds can teach us how.
