Tourism recovery slower than expected in Nepal

When peace was restored to Nepal, all had high hopes. However, figures gathered so far from tourism industry suggest a different picture and immediate boost for the sector remains elusive as ever.

According to a leading media group's website, eKantipur.com's report on Saturday, neither the Nepali tourism industry seems to take advantage of rising outbound tourists from neighboring countries, nor can it receive any trickle-down effect from the booming Indian tourism industry.

According to the website, getting rooms at five-star hotels in India is a daunting task, where the average room rate has skyrocketed to 350 U.S. dollars a night. But, Nepali deluxe five- star hotels sell rooms at the very cheap price of around 50 dollars. Still, many rooms in Nepali hotels are empty as sufficient numbers of tourists have not yet come.

On the back of its growing economy and strong emergence of its middle class, India has been generating around 7 million outbound tourists annually, while 31 million Chinese enjoy foreign tours every year.

Of this astounding figure, Nepal attracted just 6,000 Chinese tourists and 95,000 Indians in 2006. The overall tourist arrivals grew only marginally by 0.4 percent in December to 26,462, falling far short of earlier expectations.

All this justifies that conflict alone is not the stumbling block to tourism growth and a string of obstacles continue to cripple the industry.

Shortage of product diversification, constraints in air accessibility, ineffective marketing strategy and poor tourism infrastructure deter the industry from sailing through with success, tourism entrepreneurs said.

"We (tourism sector and the government) are just moving ahead with the same faults, blaming our shortcomings to one excuse or another," Yogendra Shakya, former president of Hotel Association of Nepal was quoted by the website as saying.

"Potential is there, but we are unable to tap it," he said, adding that the tourism industry needs to come out from its sole focus on the niche market of adventure tourism.

Observing that nobody has seriously thought about tourism, he said even five-star hotels have given special focus to domestic tourists, rather than trying to woo foreigners.

Source: Xinhua