Golden opportunity for Tourists

A Golden Opportunity for Tourists

1.Local participation-
Whatever additional demand we are trying to generate in the contest of this national campaign,
will be distributed to the new tourism areas which are being developed as site attractions.
The lacal communities are involved in planning and implementing the tourism activites in these
new areas. As for developing special tour packages to these areas, that is supposed to be done
by the private sector-i.e. the travel trade operators and hotels. We have enlisted different
potential sites with their resource base and are also trying rto encourage local communities
through awareness programmes and short-term human resource development programmes so that they
can handle the visitors in a nice and hospitable manner.

In terms of creating awareness about the ambitious NTY 2011 at the grasstoots, we have been able
to get the message across the local level. As a result, the the representatives of the general
public in a number of districts are already very eager to "do something" in their local products
and destinations, thereby contributing to the success of the national campaign as well. There
could be various ways to do so at the local level: providing home stay and lodging services
to the tourists, or even arranging for camping and trekking on new, lacal routes.

2.Sites, Activities, Facilities-
Our tourism products can be broadly classified into three categories: sites, activities, and
facilities. A site product is any place with its own unique element of attraction which can
motivate the tourist for a trip. Nepal has to offer a number of special tour and trekking packages
to such sites, including spiritual tours to various monasteries. Activities are basically a list of
things the visitors can do and enjoy once they are in Nepal. Here again we have fantastic offers in
the form of unique adventure-based activities like rafting, canoeing, mountain biking, sky-diving,
paragliding and even high altitude marathon. Staying with a local family in some rural, remote
area is in itself an attraction. In short, NTY-2011 will be a golden opportunity for the international
community to visit this beautiful and unique country and have a life-time experience. Coming to
facilities, especially the modern facilities, let's not forget that our tourism brand is 'Naturally Nepal".
So tourist should not expect modern facilities everywhere. Rather, they should try and enjoy the
closeness with nature as they will be exposed to different challenges arising out of the absence
of modern facilities of life. Every year, some 50,000 international tourist go to everest base
camp, where there is no road, on airport, no hotel and no electricity. This goes a long way
to explain Nepal's uniqueness as a destination, especially for adventure tourism.

3.Market Segmentation-
We've classified our international market in to three different categories. One is the conventional
market which includes Western Europek North America, Japan and Austrila, which contributes almost
45 percent to the total tourist arrival in Nepal. Second is the volume market comprising of India
and China, which is expected to contribute almost 35 percent of the overall tourist arrivals. And the
third emerging market is in the South East Asian countries starting from Korea to Thailand,
Singapore and everything goes well, we are confident about achieving the goal of bringing in a million
tourists for NTY from these three specific markets alone--700 thousand by air and 300 thousand by road.

4.Political Commitment-
However, we need a firm commitment from the political parties to support the NTY campaign. All
political parties have put the tourism industry in high priority in their election manifestoes.
But the recent actions of some parties do not match their commitments to the tourism industry.
Bandhs, general strikes and other political disturbances have always proved detrimental to a steady
growth of tourism, which is primarily a service-oriented industry. Our concern is that service
delivery should not be distrubed, no matter what. Everyone should clearly understand that only
tourism, if it is given a fair chance to thrive, can give us quick economic recovery with minimum
additional investment.

To sum up, by the end of 2011, we want to see tourism development integrated with the national
development process. The confidence we have been able to build up with the outbound operators in tourist
generating markets in recent times has been very positive. This year growth forecast for global
tourism is 3-4 percent , but we are achieving 10 times more than that. And we are confident that it
will continue.