Yak Tales and Takes

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 ...

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...

Whither, Nepal’s Tourism? Much has been written about the country’s tourism sector but, mostly from the academic or developmental point of view. Many Master Plans have been put forward. Once again, they have been formulated keeping in mind the lofty ideals of delivering development, easing poverty, creating jobs, etc. Often, I have been a willing and sometimes unwilling, party to these shenanigans where the only result has been the generation of reports and plans that nobody ever refers to again! What is stopping this sector from re-positioning itself as the driving force of the Nepali economy, in the short and medium term, earning money for the country that will enable investments in sectors with longer gestation periods and with Returns on Investment sometime in the distant future?  An engine that can haul the Nepali economy, if you will. Cleanly, with minimal environmental impact, allowing us to move from an agrarian economy to a services economy and bypassing the whole,...

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...