Tourists bound for Mussoorie will now have to get themselves registered on an online portal developed by the Uttarakhand tourism department.
The new rule, effective from Friday, is aimed at regulating the influx of visitors and managing traffic in the hill station located 34km north of capital Dehradun.
“Besides regulating the crowd, we will be able to keep track of the exact footfall in Mussoorie every year. We can also provide better facilities if visitors reach there in a controlled manner,” Uttarakhand tourism secretary Dhiraj Singh Garbyal told reporters in Dehradun.
“We will implement the same rule at other places in the state as well,” he added.
Visitors who successfully fill up the online form will get a QR code that can be scanned at checkposts and during check-ins at accommodations.
Hotels, guest houses, homestays and other such facilities also have to register on the portal and fill in details of their guests as they check in.
Mussoorie is the most sought-after tourist destination in Uttarkhand after Nainital and Rishikesh. Tourists who can’t make it to Shimla in adjoining Himachal Pradesh also prefer the Uttarakhand hotspots. As most visitors use cars to get to the hill stations in Uttarakhand, the Dehradun-Mussoorie highway is packed with traffic for hours in the summer. Often it takes tourists five-seven hours to
get to Mussoorie from Dehradun, a distance that can normally be covered in one and a half hours.
Over 21 lakh tourists visited Mussoorie last year compared with 11 lakh in 2022.
Currently, pilgrims of Chardham and Hemkund Sahib have to fill up a registration form before visiting the state.