Data from online travel platform MakeMyTrip showed executive travellers currently account for 80-90% of hotel bookings across nearly 200 non-metro cities such as Ashoknagar, Hamirpur, Bhilwara, and Jaipur. FCM Travel India said nearly 60% of its domestic bookings during April-September were on non-metro routes.
“For instance, Ashoknagar, a city in Madhya Pradesh, sees 90% of its total accommodation bookings tied to work trips. Similarly, Hamirpur in Uttar Pradesh, Shahpura and Bhilwara in Rajasthan, Jajpur in Odisha, Fatehabad in Haryana, each record more than 80% of their accommodation demand driven by business requirements,” said Raj Rishi Singh, chief business officer, corporate, flights and Gulf Cooperation Council at MakeMyTrip, which serves over 66,500 corporates. Notably, these cities are home to major manufacturers such as Tata Steel, Tata Power, and Neelachal Ispat Nigam Ltd.
FCM Travel India, the corporate travel arm of Flight Centre Travel Group, is experiencing an increasing frequency of business trips from smaller cities. “Close to 60% of all domestic bookings in the last six months were on non-metro routes,” said Sunny Sodhi /designation/, adding it marks a sharp rise of only 30-40% last year.
According to Sodhi, smaller cities are “emerging as the new growth engines” due to better business centres and improved rail and air connectivity. He cited Goa, Surat, Raipur, Lucknow, Vijayawada, Nagpur, Indore, Visakhapatnam and Ahmedabad as the emerging centres for business travel.
In the hospitality industry, companies are opening new hotels to capture the growth trend in smaller cities. According to the HVS Anarock September 2025 report, year-to-date branded hotel signings rose 29% from a year earlier, adding 38,806 rooms. A large share of these new signings came from outside the metros, with Tier 3 and 4 cities making up 42.3%, and Tier 2 markets adding another 30.2%.
JLL’s March 2025 report showed a similar pattern, with Tier 2 and 3 cities accounting for half of all hotel transactions, mostly in unbranded midscale properties. This growth pushed better-quality hotels into markets such as Amritsar, Mathura, and Bikaner that earlier had limited room supply.Corporate flight demand is also shifting. Airports in Nagpur, Vijayawada, and Visakhapatnam, home to companies such as Vizag Steel Plant and Hindustan Zinc, are seeing steady growth, supporting regular business travel and regional operations.
Between April and September 2025, Vijayawada handled 682,129 passengers (up 11.6% year-on-year), Visakhapatnam 1,456,686 (up 4.6%), and Nagpur 1,395,384 (up 2.7%).
Industry executives say direct flight connectivity and hotel inventory in smaller towns still lag demand. Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) are now recalibrating to serve small and medium-sized companies expanding across regional manufacturing clusters. “The single biggest driver of travel growth today is the expansion of the SME and MSME sector,” said Gaurav Patwari, CBO (Air & B2B) at Cleartrip. This includes hubs such as Hosur, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, and Tiruppur.
Thomas Cook is also witnessing the trend of corporate travel extend to the smaller cities. “We are witnessing regional demand from our multinational and Indian corporate houses too, from industries like Automobile, Oil & Gas, FMCG, Audit & Consultancy — giving strong lift to business travel on sectors like Rajkot, Indore, Visakhapatnam, Lucknow, Jamnagar,” said Indiver Rastogi, group head, global business travel at Thomas Cook (India).
Even leisure markets are getting a corporate push. Yatra Online said destinations including Varanasi, Guwahati, Shillong, Puri, Pune and Kochi are emerging as meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions or MICE centres in line with expanding infrastructure and air connectivity.
Ashoknagar (Madhya Pradesh): Textiles, small-scale manufacturing, cement works
Hamirpur (Uttar Pradesh): Leather shoes, small-scale engineering, light manufacturing
Bhilwara (Rajasthan): Textile manufacturing (cotton yarn, polyester fabrics), mining, stone exports
Jajpur (Odisha): Steel, aluminium, heavy engineering
Hosur (Tamil Nadu): Automobile components, engineering goods, electronics
Aurangabad (Maharashtra): Automotive components, pharmaceuticals, engineering SMEs
Nagpur (Maharashtra): Industrial and logistics hub
Vijayawada (Andhra Pradesh): Manufacturing, trade, logistics
Visakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh): Steel, heavy industry, port-related corporate activity
Pune (Maharashtra): IT, automotive, industrial clusters
Kochi (Kerala): IT, industrial clusters, port-related business