Tourists used to flock to India's party capital, Goa. Now many are heading elsewhere

"Today's traveller wants to make quick decisions and take last-minute trips. So this [the visa delay] is definitely a big contributing factor to the drop in numbers," Dias told the BBC.

He says a big Russian charter group recently cancelled their planned Goa trip and went to Vietnam instead where demand has "hit the roof".

Besides on-arrival visas, affordability is a key factor behind the outperformance of these countries relative to Goa.

The boom in domestic visitors as well as the MICE economy (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions) has priced out many foreign visitors from hotels with good star ratings, according to Dias.

Supply of affordable beach-front resorts is also more limited in Goa compared with Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Thailand, where one can get a package deal at half the rate, if not cheaper.

The axing of a direct London Gatwick-Goa Air India service has also had an impact.

At a shack off Benaulim Beach north of Palolem, Nicola, a hairdresser who's come for three weeks with her friends Alison and Dwayne, told the BBC she had to do an unplanned layover in Mumbai because of the axed service, which was not convenient.

She said her brother chose to go to Sri Lanka instead this year.

"It's definitely more up and coming. He thought it was more affordable and also far cleaner than Goa," she said.

Dias says the government has ramped up its effort to keep the beaches litter-free, but admits that many roads leading towards them have been defaced by garbage - "not a good view", he admits, "especially for foreign tourists who are very particular about cleanliness".

Prohibitively high taxi fares as a result of the aggressive resistance of local unions to app-based services is also another "big problem", he says.

"It's like living in the Stone Age, you cannot get a taxi on your app in Goa because the local unions will confront them."

None of this speaks well for the tourist-dependent local economy of this laid-back tropical paradise.

According to Shervyn Lobo, who runs a 100-room hotel near Goa's popular Baga beach stretch, footfall of overseas visitors has dropped at least 10% at his property. While he has been able to mitigate the impact through higher local bookings, foreigners are preferred guests in hotels like his because they stay longer and keep the rooms occupied.

They are also more likely to buy excursions, hire motorbikes and eat out at local shacks and restaurants compared with Indian visitors who often prefer to pay for a full-board vacation, says Dias - highlighting how the drop in overseas tourists is impacting the broader tourist ecosystem.

But the local government has woken up to the problem, says Dias, admitting that perhaps Goa let its guard down for too long.

"We are now trying our best to get the foreigners back with road shows. We recently went to Poland, and Scandinavia is our next target market," he said, adding that the state is also keen to draw more non-European visitors from Asia and Africa in the years ahead.

But with the rise of cheaper, cleaner and more fiercely tourist-driven alternatives emerging across the continent, this land of whitewashed churches, colourful Portuguese homes and charming Susegad people (the quintessential Goan trait of living a slow life) will be forced to sweat much harder to win them back.

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