Chinese outbound tourism to Nepal

The new eBook Chinese Outbound Tourism 2017-2019 Week by Week – The 100 Best Editorials of COTRI WEEKLY brings together the 100 best editorials of the years 2017-2019. Today let’s look at the editorial of 4 June 2019 reporting about a summit in Kathmandu on 31 May 2019.

Nepal was the host of the first Asian Resilience Summit in Kathmandu to celebrate the successful resilience efforts demonstrated over the years by Nepal and in overcoming the devastating effects of the 2015 earthquakes, with the Global Travel and Tourism Resilience Council, UNWTO and PATA as co-organisers.
I had the honour of participating as a panellist in the summit at the 1st Asian Tourism Resilience Summit in Kathmandu, Nepal. My first visit to Nepal happened a few months after the earthquakes, so I could see the work which had been done but also the houses and temples still in ruins. The reconstruction of the buildings actually seemed to be the lesser problem compared to the fact that a growing number of Nepalese had decided to stay in the capital rather than to go back to rebuild their homes in remote valleys.
High-ranking personalities including Dr. Taleb Rifai, former Secretary General of UNWTO and Chairman of the Global Travel and Tourism Resilience Council (GTTRC), H.E. Edmund Bartlett, Minister of Tourism of Jamaica and founder of the Global Tourism Resilience/Crisis Management Centre, as well as Dr. Mario Hardy (CEO PATA) and Tom Jenkins (CEO ETOA) spoke about resilience in the fact of natural catastrophes and terrorism.
My contribution concentrated on the danger of cheap round-trip tours attracting the wrong kind of Chinese visitors, lowering the quality of the authentic experience, resulting in the pushing out of traditional markets and environmental destruction without being profitable or even satisfactory to the Chinese customers.
Moving forward just one year to today, the problem is not the wrong kind of visitors, but no visitors at all. For some time Nepali inbound tour operators tried to lure visitors with the fact that no CoViD-19 cases had yet been reported in the country. This story, however, broke down with the arrivals of sickness and death, even though five patients who died out of 1,000 reported cases are still quite low.
2020 was supposed to be the Visit Nepal Year, with a NICE Nepal India China Expo organised as a kickoff
event at the end of February. COTRI had been asked to help organise a conference during NICE.
Alas, the fair and the year had to be cancelled and COTRI provided instead a webinar for the Nepal
Tourism Board about Chinese Outbound Tourism to Nepal and CoViD-19.
Tourism Resilience has taken on a new meaning in the current situation, however, natural disasters,
climate change, terrorism and the wrong kind of visitors are still dangers to be dealt with now and in
the future.
The eBook Chinese Outbound Tourism 2017-2019 Week by Week – The 100 Best Editorials of COTRI
WEEKLY (ISBN 978-3-944757-11-7) is available at https://china-outbound.com/ebooks/

Next Friday’s topic: Chinese outbound tourism and statistics