Yak Tales and Takes

 Just to be clear. The new Pokhara Regional International Airport, whatever that means, should never have been built. An eight lane Express-way replete with tunnels et al, linking Pokhara to the newly built Bhairahawa International Airport would have served everyone, including the Nepali economy, much better. That the Chinese stuffed this project down the Government of Nepal’s throat is no secret and much will be said and written about that modus operandi well into the future. Which brings us to Bhairahawa International. That the Asian Development Bank approved loans based on assumptions about concessions that India would make to show their neighborliness is going to be taught in classrooms for a long time. So, now that we have them, what do we do with them? Two spanking new airports and no international flights to anywhere. One could say, “Let’s go look at the business plans again”. But I think if these existed someone would have dusted them off and taken a look by now. Or we co...

Why stop at a ‘Visit Nepal Decade’? Why not a set aside a ‘Decade for Nepal’? While the VND is a welcome move, much needs to be done to make it a reality. Especially challenging will be securing multi-partisan support. And on this hinge the dream. If dreams are all it takes why not conjure up a Decade for Nepal? A decade in which we can aim not just for a USD 7.5 billion in revenue from tourism but in which we can aim to take our GDP to quarter of a trillion United States Dollars. Things are happening around the world, in our own neighborhood, and indeed in Nepal itself that could make all things align for something like this to happen. Companies are moving away from China. They have not all left already but, increasingly, in boardrooms around the world, the refrain is ‘we are not putting any more investment into China,’ and the investors of those companies and their consumers agree. The world’s factory floor of the last sixty years does not look so enticing anymore. This is a re...

On the 23 rd of September 2022, the Nepali Cabinet approved a plan by Nepal’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation to declare a Visit Nepal Decade from 2023 to 2032. The twin primary aims of the campaign will be to attract five million tourists by 2032 from an earlier all-time high of 1.2 million visitors in 2019 and increase the average spending per tourist per day to USD 125 from the current USD 47. Both are daunting tasks but not as ambitious as a third aim, discussed and discarded as being impractical; to increase the average length of stay to 20 days per tourist from the present 12 days. It will do well to recall here that past Visit Nepal campaigns were limited to a particular year. Visit Nepal ’98. Destination Nepal 2011, Lumbini Tourism Year 2012, and most recently the aborted Visit Nepal Year 2020. Each of those in addition, save the Lumbini one, had a single aim - denoted in number of tourists to be attracted to Nepal in that particular year. In 1998 the aim a...

 The first flight into Kathmandu’s Gauchar Airport, a Douglas DC-3 ‘Dakota’ landed in 1949 only thirty-five years after the first EVER commercial flight took place in the United States of America. And that first flight, whether born of the romance of travel or bearing VIPs projecting their importance, fired up the Nepali imagination. In a country of jungles, rivers, hills, mountains, and foot trails that formed the ‘highway system’, and even now described as inaccessible, the aero plane offered up undreamt-of possibilities. Air travel would open Nepal to the outside world in the late fifties and the far-flung Nepali cities, – often several days’ travel-time away – would thrum to the sound of the ‘Dakotas’. At the forefront of this amazing transformation would be Royal Nepal Airlines or RA. –the sometimes venerated, but often vilified, National Carrier of Nepal. Development of Short Take Off and Landing (STOL) planes like the Pilatus PC-6 ‘Porter’ and the De Havilland DHC-6 ‘Twi...

Nepal's tourism sector was allowed to grow organically during the last sixty or so years. The private sector-led growth has been left largely to market dynamics both on the supply and demand sides, leading ultimately to a long-running over-supply situation with negative price pressure. So much so, that some arrival segments were producing zero profits with operators having to leech commissions off shop-keepers to stay viable.    While tourism was taking off as a world-wide phenomenon everything was about opening up and creating access. The people coming to Nepal were still few and far between and Nepal's policies of private sector-driven tourism with visa-on-arrival to all and sundry were hailed as enviable. Then, when mushroom-like growth on the supply side led to increasing pressures on price and decreasing delivery of services, cries of despair went up. "This has to stop". "There are too many suppliers, not enough tourists". "This sort of competit...

The long term prospects for tourism in Nepal is anybody's guess. No one dares to look into that abyss right now. The fog of COVID-19 is just too thick to enable anyone to see that far out. That is not to say that tourism as a viable product is dead in the water. It certainly is not. Too many people have been bitten by the travel bug to stop traveling altogether especially once the various governments deem it fit to go a-wandering. But, will tourism revert to resembling anything close to pre-COVID-19 days?  Globally, in the short term, once travel restrictions are lifted tourism will re-start as a trickle. This will not be a sudden synchronized event, coordinated between governments, orchestrated by some wizard but, a slow painful process - city by city, county by county, province by province, state by state, and country by country.  Airlines will begin to take to the skies - after pilots and grounded planes after been re-certified, hotels will re-open their doors ...