Our story
We started with one boat, one guide, and a lot of long emails to Europe.
Big Indian Tours grew out of a simple frustration: travellers arriving in Kerala with beautiful expectations and badly organised trips. We knew the backwaters, the hill roads, the families who cook the best fish curry on the coast — so we began putting journeys together ourselves, one at a time.
Why Kerala
Kerala is the gentlest doorway into India. It's green, coastal and calm; it has the country's highest literacy rate and one of its warmest welcomes; English is spoken almost everywhere; and the distances are short enough that you're never more than a few hours from the next beautiful thing.
For a first-time visitor from Europe, that combination matters. You get the colour, the spice markets, the temple drums and the elephants — without the scale and intensity that can make a first trip to India exhausting.
We plan around jet lag, around the heat of the day, around the fact that you might want an afternoon doing absolutely nothing. That's the whole idea.
How we work
Responsible, local, and small on purpose
Only Kerala, done properly
We don't sell all of India. Kerala is where we live, and where we can promise you the small details are right.
Local families, fairly paid
Our homestays, boat crews, drivers and guides are people we know by name and pay above the local going rate.
Light on the places we love
Small groups, no single-use plastic on our boats, and routes planned to avoid the crowded, over-visited stretches.
A note from our founder
"I grew up between Kochi and the backwaters, and I've spent twenty years showing people around them. What I want for every traveller who writes to us is simple: that you arrive nervous and leave feeling like you had a friend here the whole time. That's the standard we hold ourselves to on every single trip."
Arun - Founder, Big Indian Tours · Kochi, Kerala