June 20: Although the arrival of tourists in Nepal, dropped after the onset of Covid-19 infection, the stay period of the tourists had extended. The average length of stay of tourists increased in the previous two years, but is now going downhill.

The average stay of tourists in Nepal never reached 15 days in the last decade except for 2020 and 2021 – the two years of the Covid-19 pandemic period when the average stay of tourists in Nepal had reached 15 days, according to the Economic Survey 2079/80 published by the Ministry of Finance. However, in 2022, when the pandemic subsided and arrival of tourists gradually improved, the length of stay decreased. According to the economic survey, the average stay of tourists dropped to 13.1 days in 2022, which was 15.1 days in 2020 and 15.5 days in 2021.

The 'Nepal Tourism Statistics 2021' released by the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation also shows that tourists stayed in Nepal for the longest period of time in the last decade. In other years, the average length of stay was 12 to 13.5 days.

President of Hotel Association Nepal (HAN) Binayak Shah says that due to the standards introduced by the government to avoid and prevent the spread of Covid-19 including mandatory quarantine, the length of stay of tourists had increased.

According to Shah, more tourists came from neighboring countries as the Covid-19 gradually decreased. As they went to destinations like Kathmandu, Pokhara, Chitwan, the length of their stay decreased. According to the economic survey, 10 percent of the total tourists come for adventure trekking/mountaineering and around 64.7 percent come for entertainment, holidays and travel. The share of pilgrims is 12.9 percent.

Lumbini emerged as the main choice of domestic and foreign tourists in 2022 for religious tourism. The total number of domestic and foreign tourists who visited Lumbini in 2022 was 904,000. This number includes 649,000 Nepalese, 231,000 Indians and 24,000 from other countries.

About 1,200,000 million tourists arrived in Nepal in 2019, 230,000 tourists in 2020 and 151,000 visitors in 2021. Since 2022, there has been an improvement in tourist arrivals. In 2022, a total of 614,869 tourists have visited Nepal. According to the data of Nepal Tourism Board, a total of 404,231 tourists arrived in Nepal in 5 months of 2023.