Tourist arrivals to Nepal are down by more than half compared to two years ago. Nearly 460,000 tourists visited Nepal in 2000, and the latest figures show that this figure plummeted to 216,000 in 2002. Never in the past 20 years have tourist arrivals been so low.

According to the Nepal Tourism Board (NTB), a total of 215,922 tourists visited Nepal in 2002 compared to 298,456 visitors in 2001. The only segment of the market that showed some improvement was Indian tourists, who are up by just over two percent from last year. The biggest drops are in arrivals from the United States and Britain. The industry blames alarmist travel advisories from those two countries for the downturn. Despite China listing Nepal as an outbound destination, tourists from our northern neighbour dropped by 20 percent. NTB, for its part, blames the decline in third country tourist arrivals on the general slackness in international tourism and negative international coverage of Nepal.