TravTalk India Online Magazine
After a successful conclusion of the first leg of Nepal Sales Mission, Nepal Tourism Board has identified 100 new tourism sites and regions in Nepal out of which 30 have been taken up for promotion this year under the ‘Lifetime Experiences’ campaign. With this, the NTO will highlight Nepal’s range of tourism products apt for the India market.
Manas Dwivedi
Focused on the India market, Nepal Tourism Board (NTB) wants to enhance awareness about Nepal’s tourist regions and offerings to various Indian cities through sales missions, roadshows and by participation in different trade exhibitions. Sharing more details, Lila Bahadur Baniya, Officiating Director – PR & Publicity, Nepal Tourism Board, says that the first leg of Nepal Sales Mission in India received a good response from the Indian travel trade. “We visited Amritsar, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Indore, Surat, Pune, Trichy, Trivandrum and Kochi with 14 industry partners from Nepal and a delegation of NTB. The main focus of this sales mission was to reconnect the travel industry of Nepal to India with reinforced energy and a new strategy towards bilateral growth and development of tourism so as to benefit the travel industry of both countries. With good road and air connectivity to India, we have always given high priority to the India market,” he said.
After the first phase of the Sales Mission, we will evaluate our performance and then enter another phase of missions, which will cover other major cities of India
Talking about its marketing and promotion strategy for the Visit Nepal Year (VNY) 2020 campaign and beyond, Baniya said that Nepal is organising a ‘Tour Operator Awareness Program’.
“After the first phase of Nepal Sales Mission, we will evaluate our performance and then enter another phase of sales missions, which will cover other major cities of India. We want to motivate Indian tour operators and the media to encourage tourists to travel to Nepal,” he said.
With Visit Nepal Year 2020 campaign, Nepal hopes to receive two million tourists this year. Till October 2019, the tourist arrivals from India (by air) to Nepal was 143,870 with a 10 per cent increase in comparison to the same period last year, which makes India the number one tourist source market for Nepal.
The total international arrivals were 975,557 (till October 2019), whereas the total arrivals for 2018 during the same period were 903,539. Year 2018 also witnessed a total arrivals figure of 1,173,072.
Apart from air travel, Nepal gets a huge inflow of Indian travellers through land routes. A study by Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation, Government of Nepal, shows that over one million Indian travellers enter Nepal through land routes.
Under Visit Nepal Year 2020, the Nepal government is giving priority to the diversity of tourism products and has identified 100 new tourism destinations in Nepal out of which NTB is giving priority to 30 destinations in 2020 for ‘lifetime experiences’. These include parts of Muktinath, Rara Lake and Karnali zone, where Nepal is going to develop one of the world’s longest river-rafting tracks. “We are going to organise different M!CE events in Nepal, while also working on promoting night tourism in Kathmandu with ‘Kathmandu Valley by Night’ campaign. We are in the process of developing some routes and promoting night activities, and tourists can enjoy the different cultural aspects, local handicraft shops and regional food,” Baniya said.
