An Evaluative Study of the Impact of GST Enforcement on India's Share of Foreign Tourist Arrival

India is known for its various natural tourist attractions and extraordinary immortal humanitarian heritage which enable it to effectively contribute to the humanistic civilization, but unfortunately India?s share of foreign tourist arrival is still insignificant, apparently, for many reasons such as insufficient infrastructures, insufficient ancillary tourist services and amenities and lack of promotional efforts for tourism abroad. The current study mainly aimed at contributing with brief theoretical construct about tourism industry in India and the enforcement of GST in tourism industry in India, evaluating the positive and negative impacts of the enforcement of GST on India?s share of foreign tourist arrival and at offering recommendations to increase India?s share of foreign tourist arrival through GST enforcement. Since the current study is theoretical and descriptive in its nature, the secondary data collected from several sources such as journals, books, websites etc. to review and evaluate the impact of GST on India?s share of foreign tourist arrival which is related to FEEs (Foreign Exchange Earnings) as one of the principal drivers of the national economy. The authors concluded that GST enforcement in tourism industry has both positive and negative impacts on India?s share of foreign tourist arrival. Some of the positive impacts mainly include: the relatively reduction in costs of tourist products and services resulting from the removal of the cascading effects of tax on tax, providing the tourists/ tax payers with the transparency that makes them aware of the actual amount of tax that they have to pay and hence enhancing the trust of tourists in the tourist businesses which is inevitable in creating customer loyalty, and the encouragement to the economic travel and tourism through granting tourists/travelers good reduction in the levied tax in economic class tourist businesses/services. Whereas the negative impacts can be summarized as: The aforementioned transparency enables tourists to accurately compare the GST levied in India to that levied in some competitive tourist destinations in the region and India, because of the higher tax rate, may be replaced by other tourist destinations. The high rates of tax on the business class hotels, restaurants and air travels which range from 12% to 18%, more likely, have negative impacts on India?s share of foreign tourist arrival and particularly of such important segment of the market that represents a good source of FEEs. The enforcement of GST with its high rates has an impact on cost and prices of the tourist services in India and hence on tourists? loyalty which might be negatively reflected on India?s share of foreign tourist arrival. The authors, accordingly, offered recommendations to increase India?s share of foreign tourist arrival through GST enforcement.