Tourism has emerged as a strategic sector influencing economic growth, cultural diplomacy, and the projection of soft power across nations. In advanced economies, tourism policy has moved beyond destination-based promotion toward the creation of integrated ecosystems that combine religion, leisure, healthcare, and experience-based services. Globally, tourism accounts for approximately 10 per cent of world GDP and employment, underscoring its systemic importance to national economies.

The European Union provides a useful analytical benchmark for understanding how tourism can be institutionalized as an integrated economic system rather than a collection of destinations. This model enables year-round demand, diversification of tourism risk, and high-value service delivery through institutional coordination rather than isolated destination marketing. India, despite possessing comparable, and in several dimensions, superior civilizational depth, natural diversity, and medical capabilities, has yet to operationalize a similarly integrated tourism ecosystem fully. Instead, tourism segments in India continue to function mainly in isolation, limiting value capture and international competitiveness. Against this backdrop, the paper first examines tourism as an economic system and then analyses the European experience to derive policy-relevant insights for India's tourism development strategy. Tourism is therefore increasingly understood not merely as a service sector, but as an integrated economic system with implications for employment, regional development, and external competitiveness.