Nepal has welcomed 476,481 international tourists in the first six months of 2023. This is an average of 79,413 tourists every month.

Mani Raj Lamichhane, head of the Research, Planning and Monitoring Department at the Nepal Tourism Board (NTB), said this is an almost 97 per cent recovery to the pre-pandemic levels. In June 2019, a total of 74,883 tourists arrived in the country.

The year immediately before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, was one of the best years for tourism in Nepal. A total of 1,197,191 foreign tourists entered the country by land and air that year.

This is the highest number the country had ever recorded. This means that, on average, 99,765 tourists came to Nepal every month that year.

But in 2020, the year the coronavirus outbreak began in Nepal, the number of foreign tourists plummeted to 230,085.

In 2021, it fell still further to 150,962. The year 2022 saw a slight uptick to 614,869.

To revitalise the tourism sector of the country, the government announced in its budget for the Fiscal Year 2023/24 that it would celebrate the 10 years from 2023 to 2033 as the tourism decade and shared its intention to bring 1 million tourists into the country in 2023.

The latter is in line with the target unveiled by the NTB last year and one that it has since maintained is possible by attracting visitors from Asia.

So far this year, the highest number of tourists came from India, as per the NTB. From January to June, 167,605 came from our southern neighbour.

The second highest number, 49,433, came from the United States.

The United Kingdom, China and Australia were the third, fourth and fifth largest source markets for Nepali tourism respectively.

Since the start of this Gregorian year, 24, 264, 20, 117 and 17,696 tourists have come from these three countries.

In June alone, 72,250 foreigners came to Nepal by air, according to the Department of Immigration.