CAAN Souvenir 2010.FH10 - Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal

CAAN Souvenir 2010In 1962, when Nepal first started to keep records of datarelated to tourism, there were only 6,179 tourist arrivals inthe country. This figure rose to 509752 in 2009, registeringa growth of nearly 8250 percent in the 47 year period,despite suffering two major slumps: one between 1992 and1993 and the other between 1999 and 2002.Economic Contributions from Tourism SectorThe total foreign currency earnings from the tourism sector isabout NRs. 27960 million in 2008/09. This amount is 40% of total value of merchandise exports, 6.5 % of total foreignexchange earnings and nearly 3 % of the GDP (MoF, 2010).The historical data on foreign exchange earnings from tourismshows that the share of tourism is declining due to the increasingshare of remittance income. However, in terms of GDP itsshare is in between 1.4 to 4.1 during past 35 years (MoF,2010).Source: MoF, 2010If we see the purpose of tourists for visiting the country nearlyone third are for pleasure, 21 % are for the purpose of trekkingand mountaineering, 10 percent are for pilgrimage 8 percentFigure 3: Tourist Arrival by Regions in 2009for official, 5 % for business 1 % for meeting and seminarand 21 % for other purposes (figure 2).15Source: MoF, 2010Among the total tourists the share of Asia is highest. Nearly56 % tourists come from Asia. In terms of single nation touristsfrom India is highest. The share of Indian tourists is 18.4 % andthe share of African tourists is very low i.e. 0.2 % (Figure 3).Overall tourist arrivals declined from 1999 to 2002 andrecovered in two phases from 2003 to 2004 and 2006 to2008. The decline was caused by the deteriorating imageof Nepal as a safe destination, owing to the then internalconflict due to Maoiest insurgency and regional andinternational incidents such as September 11 terrorist attacks,war in Afganisthan (Haslett, 2001) were some factors.The recovery on the other hand was caused partly by the12 th Anniversary Publication