Yak Tales and Takes

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 ...

The last blog I wrote was in April 2015, after the Gorkha Earthquake had devastated our industry, and we were trying to figure out whether there would be an industry to go back to. Well, there was, and it was all going well, with Visit Nepal 2020 expected to deliver somewhere between 1.3 million and 2 million tourists to Nepal by December 31. Not anymore. COVID-19 and its impact have decimated the world tourism industry. Whereas the earthquake of 2015 was a local event, this is global. In 2105 our economy was the only one impacted. In 2020, it feels like the whole world's economy is going to hell in a bucket! Airlines are grounded. Some will fly again. Some won't. Airports are closed. Land borders are sealed and governments are working overtime to build "walls", where none existed, not even in the minds of the most xenophobic persons. Isolation and Quarantine are the two most often used words right now. Both are anathema to the conduct of tourism. At least, to to...