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...

Nepal’s Tourism: The road to recovery. There is a reason I have refrained from calling this ‘The long road to recovery’. That being, the time frame for the recovery of our industry is within our own control, once the ground stops shaking. Once, we the local population, are confident about not looking at one another in panic, wondering if another aftershock has hit and we are confident about not sleeping in ground floor rooms to be able to make an early exit, should the next aftershock be bigger than the last. Then our moment will have come and we will be in a position to say to the world “Come to Nepal!” When that time comes, and it will come faster than we can imagine, then we need to move fast, very fast. In fact, we will need to move faster than we would have moved if the next earthquake did, indeed hit! To move quickly when an anticipated event occurs in the future, we need to have a well thought out plan in place that allows us to leverage our available resources to effec...