Chinese tourists’ arrival up

Kathmandu, November 11

More tourists from China visited Nepal in October this year compared to the corresponding period last year.

Nepal Tourism Board said in this period, 15,037 Chinese tourists arrived in Nepal, which is 11.5 per cent more than the number of Chinese visitors coming to Nepal in the same period last year.  NTB’s statistics showed Nepal had witnessed the arrival of around 1.2 million tourists in 2018 and of them, 160,000 were from China.

Similarly, Nepal welcomed 12,706 people from India in October this year and this figure is nine per cent more than the corresponding month last year.

Overall, India is in the topmost position among source countries of tourists visiting Nepal and it is followed by China.

In 2018, around 243,000 Indian tourists had visited Nepal.

Chinese President Xi Jinping had arrived here on a two-day State visit on October 12. Following the Chinese president’s visit, the number of Chinese tourists here increased.

Although Chinese have been one of the most outbound tourists in the world, with their number standing at around 150 million in 2018, Nepal has not been able to attract the desired number of Chinese tourists.

China, however, has consistently been the second largest source market for Nepal’s tourism in the last several years, after India.

As Nepal is launching Visit Nepal-2020 campaign aiming to attract as many as 2 million tourists, the government is also gearing up to bring in at least 500,000 tourists from China alone that year.

As many as 1 million foreign tourists have visited Nepal in the last 10 months of 2019, according to NTB.

The exact number of external tourists coming to Nepal between January 1 to October 31 this year is 975,557, of them 820,499 arrived via air route while 155,058 arrived through land route, an eight per cent rise compared to the corresponding period last year.

The number of tourists visiting Nepal from European countries during this 10-month period was 199,000, up by 20.4 per cent in comparison to the corresponding period last year when Nepal saw 92,272 American and Canadian tourists.

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