Over 470,000 tourists have visited Nepal in the first 10 months of 2022, which is more than twice the number of tourists who arrived in the country in the entirety of last year.
According to the data provided by the Nepal Tourism Board (NTB), a total of 473,563 foreigners came into the country from the start of January to the end of October 2022.
Compare this to 2021 when only 150,962 came from January to December and we get a growth of around 213 per cent with two months still remaining in the year.
As per the NTB, October has seen the highest number of arrivals this year. A total of 88,582 foreign nationals came to Nepal that month which is an increase of more than 51 per cent from the preceding month of September. Similarly, in the first month of 2022, the nation saw 16,975 tourists come in.
Over the last two years, tourism had slowed down drastically due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown enforced both by Nepal and other countries across the world. In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, only 230,085 tourists came to Nepal which was a staggering drop from 2019 when around 1.2 million visited the country.
The present increase in tourist inflow has given hopes to tourism businesses about their post-COVID recovery and revival situation.
Tourism entrepreneurs were excited for 2020 as it had been declared the Visit Nepal Year (VNY) and 2 million tourists were expected to visit the country. However, with the detection of the second case of the coronavirus in the country, the then government led by Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli enforced a nationwide shutdown and sealed the international borders. This forced the cancellation of the VNY campaign.
However, the government has again decided to mark 2023-2033 as the Visit Nepal decade.
Source : TRN,
