June 2: Over 55,000 foreign tourists arrived in Nepal in January 2023 followed by 77,255 in February. The arrival of tourists reached to as high as 99,426 in March, according to the data made public by the Nepal Tourism Board (NTB).

After that, the tourism board's statistics show drop in the number of foreign visitors. According to the NTB, a total of 98,773 tourists arrived in April while the figure dropped to 77,730 in May.

A total of 404,257 foreign visitors arrived in Nepal in the first five months of 2023.

In May 2023, the highest number of foreign visitors came from Nepal’s southern neighbor - India. A total of 36,575 Indian tourists entered Nepal in the review month followed by 8,545 American tourists and 4,667 Chinese tourists.

Similarly, the number of tourists arriving in Nepal from the UK during the review month stood at 2927 and that from was 2,184. Likewise, 2,164 tourists arrived here from Bangladesh, 1,321 from Malaysia, 1,165 from Germany, 1,097 from France and 1,039 from South Korea.

The tourism sector, which has slowed down due to Covid, is picking up pace recently. The rise in arrival of tourists in Nepal can be attributed to the relaxation of COVID-19 restrictions and tourism promotion activities. The government had recently lifted the mandatory provision of requiring negative PCR test reports and COVID-19 vaccination certificate for foreign tourists to visit Nepal.

It may be noted that around 1.2 million tourists had arrived here in 2019. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of tourist visiting Nepal in 2020 and 2021 dropped significantly to 230,000 and 151,000 respectively.

But there has been a remarkable improvement in arrival of tourists since last year (2022) when an encouraging number of 614,869 tourists visited Nepal.

Looking at the data till now, NTB officials are expecting more tourists to arrive in Nepal this year. CNN Travel has listed Nepal’s Mustang district as one of the must-visit destinations in 2023. This is also expected to boost tourism in 2023.