KPMG India/PHDCCI recently published a ~60-page report titled “Heritage Reimagined: Driving Immersive, Tech-Enabled and Experience-Led Tourism.”

It covers heritage tourism, Hyderabad, AI guides, digital twins, AR/VR, gamification and even quantum cryptography.

It looks polished. Big Four branding, LOTS OF FANCY GRAPHICS, lots of citations.

So I did something simple:

I opened the citations and checked them.

I’m not saying the entire report is fake. Several headline statistics do check out.

But I found enough problems with source interpretation, sample populations, technical claims, AI analysis and basic proofreading that I genuinely wonder what the final review process looked like.

Some examples

KPMG presents	What I found
65% of “Gen Z travellers” will pay a sustainability premium — Deloitte 2025	Matching Deloitte result appears to be 64%, from 2024, and about Gen Z consumers, not specifically travellers
“Millennials and Gen Z global food trends”	Several statistics inside the chart are actually reported by American Express for all global respondents
Cultural encounters/gastronomy described as trends among travellers	Underlying ATTA research surveys adventure travel tour operators, not travellers generally
India has 145 ticketed centrally protected monuments	Contemporary 2026 Government of India statements say 143
Telangana foreign tourism: ~60k → ~150k, presented as growth	Official series is roughly 68,401 → 160,912 → 155,313. So 2024 actually declined from 2023
Digital twins were “initially developed for monitoring nuclear plants”	The cited source does not establish that history; the modern Digital Twin concept is generally traced to Michael Grieves / PLM work around 2002

The most revealing issue: changing the population

KPMG says:

“65% of Gen Z travellers are willing to pay a premium for environmentally sustainable products and services.”

But the matching Deloitte finding appears to be:

64%
from 2024, not 2025,
and referring to Gen Z consumers, not specifically travellers.

So we effectively get:

2024 → 2025
64% → 65%
consumers → travellers

The 1% difference isn't important.

Changing the population being measured is.

A consumer-attitude statistic does not automatically become evidence about tourism behaviour.

The American Express charts have a similar problem

KPMG has a chart titled:

“Millennials and Gen Z global food trends.”

It includes percentages such as 69% preferring street-food vendors, 53% exploring bakeries and 50% using grocery stores.

But American Express distinguishes between:

“global respondents”

and

“Millennials and Gen Z surveyed.”

Several percentages KPMG places under the Millennial/Gen-Z heading appear to actually describe the full global sample.

Again:

The number may be real.

The denominator isn't the one the chart implies.

Telangana is a good example of selective framing

KPMG presents foreign tourism as:

~60,000 in 2022 → ~150,000 in 2024

under a section about “growth and momentum.”

But the official sequence is approximately:

2022: 68,401
2023: 160,912
2024: 155,313

So yes, there was huge growth versus 2022.

But there was also a decline in 2024 versus 2023.

Leave out the middle year and the narrative looks much cleaner.

The AI section also deserves scrutiny

KPMG is very enthusiastic about:

AI heritage guides, AI storytelling, LLMs, personalised itineraries, generative imagery and autonomous AI travel agents.

But this is cultural heritage.

Where is the equally detailed discussion about AI inventing:

• historical events,
• dates,
• genealogies,
• translations,
• religious interpretations,
• cultural practices,
• or synthetic reconstructions?

Where are the controls around:

authoritative sources, curator approval, citations, provenance, uncertainty indicators, community consent and human review?

The report spends far more time explaining how AI can make heritage “immersive” than explaining how institutions prevent AI from manufacturing history.

Interestingly, KPMG also discloses on the final page:

“Some images in this report have been created using artificial intelligence technology.”

Good that they disclosed it.

But the report doesn't identify which images, which tools/models were used or provide image-level provenance.

For a report built around the ideas of heritage and authenticity, that's worth noting.

Then there are the spelling, grammar and QA errors

These don't prove the analysis is wrong.

But in a professionally produced KPMG report — especially one that lists a Research Team, Compliance Team and KPMG Design — the volume of obvious errors is surprising.

Examples directly from the report include:

“Adventure Travel Tarde Association”
instead of Trade Association

“Actvity Popularity Rank”
instead of Activity

“heritage securtiy”
instead of security

“Through thoughtfully interventions”

“Combing asset and experiences”
apparently meant to be Combining assets and experiences

“ways that aligns”

“travellers increasing value experiences”

“multimedia light and sound show at Golconda fort show”

There is also a Hyderabad digital-twin sentence saying the model is:

“comprising data points”

with the actual number missing — even though elsewhere in the same report KPMG gives the figure as 10.7 billion data points.

And one chart is titled:

“Foreign Tourist Arrivals to India 2019–2025”

while the chart itself stops at 2024.

One typo means nothing.

But when you combine repeated proofreading failures with source-population errors and questionable citations, it raises a fair question:

How rigorous was the final review?

The bigger problem

The report repeatedly seems to follow this logic:

Technology exists
↓
It could be used in heritage tourism
↓
Therefore engagement improves
↓
Therefore spending / dwell time / competitiveness improves

But those arrows require evidence.

A $300bn global gamification market doesn't prove gamification works at Indian monuments.

An AI itinerary generator doesn't prove visitor satisfaction improves.

A digital twin existing doesn't prove more tourists visit.

A survey of 360 Chinese heritage tourists doesn't automatically predict visitor behaviour in Hyderabad.

Evidence that a technology exists is not the same as evidence that it produces the claimed tourism outcome.

To be fair to KPMG

Several important statistics I checked do hold up.

India's ~2.948bn domestic tourist visits, ~9.95m foreign tourist arrivals, several Telangana project values and some of the headline market estimates are broadly supported.

So the correct criticism is not:

“KPMG fabricated everything.”

It is more subtle:

>

And once a polished KPMG infographic gets repeated elsewhere, people stop checking Deloitte, American Express or the government source.

That is how an interpretation error can eventually become an accepted “industry fact.”

My takeaway:

Don't assume a statistic is reliable just because the logo on the PDF is prestigious. Open the footnotes.

If I've interpreted any of the original sources incorrectly, post the source and I'll happily correct the post.

KPMG should be held to the same standard.

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