The target of one million tourists will not be reached

If we look at the global level, the number of tourists coming to Nepal in 1960 was 46 thousand. At the same time, in 2019, this number increased to 1,197,191 and according to the data of 2020 and 2021, the number of tourists visiting Nepal dropped to 230,000 and 150,963 respectively.

According to recent data, 61,360 foreign tourists visited Nepal during the eight months of 2023 (fiscal year 2079/80). Based on this data, it seems that the number of foreign tourists visiting Nepal in 2023 will not reach 1 million.

However, this cannot be said at all. Because even if we can increase the access of air transport to the industrial and densely populated cities of northern neighbor China as well as other cities and markets of India, there is a possibility of increasing the number of foreign tourists visiting Nepal.

During this time, we are expanding our internal marketing policy by focusing a little more, and the external arrival figures are going to be encouraging until the end of the year.

Looking at the statistics, only 4,667 Chinese tourists have come to Nepal in May, 4,343 in June, 5,693 in July and 5,227 in August. Therefore, if the number of Chinese tourists increases by two or three times in the remaining four months of 2023, it will be 13-14-15 thousand per month. That means 13 thousand times 26 thousand, 14 thousand times 28 thousand, 15 thousand times 30 thousand or 15 thousand times 45 thousand, which is very less likely. The same applies to Indian tourists as well.

In the current context, tourism ranks third in terms of contribution to Nepal’s GDP. Basically tourism is a flexible industry. Even if there is any kind of adverse shock to it due to circumstances, it cannot run and stops, after some time it gets refreshed and starts running again. Because of this belief, even though our tourism was going through a severe crisis, Yenken was still alive, but when there were signs that there was no increase in income but only expenses, other tourism businesses were closed down, except for the business of conducting special interest tourism activities. There are many examples of businessmen being forced to change their business.

If we look at the data, last year till August 2022, 250 million tourists visited different countries of the world. That figure was 46 percent more than the number of tourists who went to visit different countries in the world in the first five months of 2021. However, there is no doubt that if the sudden Sino-US conflict, the threat of annexing Taiwan to China, the tension between Iran and the US, and the ever-present conflicts between Israel and Palestine suddenly turn into a war, not only the world will rot, but the entire economic activity will come to a standstill.