Can Visit Nepal 2085 Succeed Where Past Campaigns Fell Short?

The Government of Nepal, with its flagship tourism campaign Visit Nepal 2085 BS (2028/29 AD), and the parallel Devbhumi Nepal, positioning Nepal as the spiritual and wellness capital, has set an ambitious target of welcoming 2.5 million international tourists, average daily spending of USD 85 (NPR 11,225) per person, an average stay of 15 days, and tourism contributing 7% of GDP by the 2028/29 AD. These are not modest aspirations especially when Nepal just recorded 1.186 million tourist arrivals until May 2026 AD (2083 BS), and the average daily spending dropping from USD 40.84 (NPR 5,455) in 2024 AD (2081 BS) to USD 33.08 (NPR 4,418.5).

These facts pose a question about Nepal’s preparedness for Visit Nepal 2085: will Nepal’s ambitions come to fruition, or will it become yet another akaash ko fal ankha tari mar? (the fruit in the sky that strains your eyes until they tire)

Nepal’s Tourism Campaign History

Nepali campaigns on tourism throughout the years have had a consistent trajectory: real momentum, missed targets, gains that fade over time, and headline numbers eventually that are achieved organically and not because of the campaigns.

In 1998 AD, Nepal introduced its first national tourism campaign titled Visit Nepal 1998, hosting 463,648 visitors, which was a growth of 10% compared to the previous year. Spearheading these efforts has been the Nepal Tourism Board (NTB), a public-private body established in 1998 under the Nepal Tourism Board Act, mandated to promote Nepal as a tourist destination and oversee the implementation of national tourism campaigns. While this campaign fell short of its 500,000 arrivals target, it put Nepal on the global map amplifying the numbers to 491,504 the following year. However, as years passed, the numbers fell. Nepal only reached half a million in 2007. Following that, Nepal Tourism Year 2011 AD targeted a million arrivals yet fell short once again. Despite a strong number of 736,215 arrivals, a 22% jump from 2010, Nepal only reached its one million milestone in 2017, without any major campaigns. This detail shows that organic growth closed the gap that major campaigns could not.

Three years later, Nepal launched its most ambitious tourism campaign yet, Visit Nepal 2020 (2077 BS). The campaign’s target of 2 million arrivals was nothing short of a dream of a 70% growth from the 2019’s peak tourist arrivals of 1.19 million. Although COVID-19 was cited as the official reason for the campaign’s failure, evidence suggests that the campaign was already struggling. The budget cut for the tourism sector in the fiscal year 2076/77 BS (2019/20 AD) by 51% to NPR 2.8 billion was flagged by stakeholders of Nepal travel and tourism trade to be insufficient at a time when the government was committed to making Visit Nepal 2020 a success story. All the three aviation projects, central to this campaign, also missed the 2020 mark: Gautam Buddha International Airport (due 2017, opened 2022), Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) upgrade (due mid-2019, lagged), and Pokhara International Airport (opened January 2023). COVID interrupted a campaign already behind, didn’t derail one on track.

Nepal’s Current Position and Plans

The current baseline for Visit Nepal 2085 is sobering with 1.186 million arrivals annual arrival (May 2025 AD – May 2026 AD), still below 2019 AD’s peak and growing at just 1% year-on-year. The average stay currently stands at 16.34 days, exceeding the target of 15 days earlier than deadline. However, according to the Economic Survey 2082/83 BS (2025/26 AD), the daily average spending plummeted from USD 40.84 (NPR 5,455) in 2024 to USD 33.08 (NPR 4,418.5) in 2025. This makes achieving the aim of USD 85 (NPR 11,225) average spending per day even more challenging in the next 2 years.

The Indian market, Nepal’s largest source of visitors, recovered well beyond pre-pandemic levels whereas the Chinese market, which was the second-largest pre-pandemic source at 151,200 visitors in 2019 only saw 63.1% recovery till 2025 with 95,480 visitors. Against this backdrop, the contribution of tourism in the GDP was 2.44% in FY 2082/83 BS (2025/26 AD), a slight increase from 2.42% in FY 2081/82 BS (2024/25 AD). This implies that the recovery of Nepal’s tourism industry is increasingly reliant on Indian arrivals, while the high-value Chinese market continues to struggle to recover.

In contrast to 2020’s plan, the 2085 package attempts to address some structural gaps. Crucial reform like the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN) restructuring to separate regulatory and operational bodies and targeting Nepal’s exit from the European Union (EU) air safety blacklist, which the country has been in since 2013, are prioritized by the new government. The same government also allocated a sum of NPR 1.53 billion (USD 10 million) to TIA upgrades, with plans of undertaking the management of Gautam Buddha International Airport and Pokhara International Airport in a private-public partnership model. The budget has also put forth financial incentives for five-star hotels to target the accommodation gap that suppresses per-tourist spend. Similarly, a one door digital tourism system, 5000 new branded homestays, and an a remote-work visa work around, mentioned in the Budget 2083/84 BS (2026/27 AD) are all strong signals than 2020’s marketing led approach. Alongside these, Nepal Wellness Year 2027 has been designated as a deliberate steppingstone, an opportunity to build the retreat, homestay, and wellness product infrastructure before the main Visit Nepal 2085 window opens. But this institution is tasked with executing all of this in about 3 years’ time.

Lessons from Comparable Economies

Three comparisons help situate where Nepal currently stands, not as a verdict on Visit Nepal 2085 but as evidence of what closing the gap has required elsewhere.

Kenya crossed Nepal’s 2.5 million target by recording 2.7 million international arrivals by the end of 2025. This was a 9% (double than the global average of 4%) increase from the 2.47 million international arrivals in 2024, which generated a record USD 4.5 billion (NPR 625.64 billion) tourism revenue. The Kenyan experience is instructive to Nepal because Kenya’s tourism model resonates with the Nepali model closely than most: nature and wildlife-led, longer average tourist stays (12.1 days in 2025), and a developing economy base. Kenya, however, recorded 2.5 million international arrivals by solving a key, structural, and identifiable policy constraint, launching a visa-free entry scheme in early 2025, which drove 48% spike in airport arrivals. Visa regime is not the key takeaway for Nepal from the Kenyan experience. The lesson for Nepal here is that statistical milestones are not reached by marketing alone but by eliminating structural chokeholds. For Nepal, the equivalent structural constraint is its EU air safety blacklist and limited wide-body and long-haul aircraft access in the Nepali aviation sector. The CAAN restructuring announced in the budget of 2083/84 (2026/27 AD) is a step in the right direction, however, it needs to be delivered not just announced.

Laos, a landlocked lower middle-income economy, has a similar development profile comparable to Nepal. It welcomed over 4.1 million international tourists in 2024, almost double Nepal’s 2028/29 AD target. In 2025 AD, Laos surpassed this number and recorded 4.6 million tourists, an 11% increase year-on-year that surpassed the government’s target of 4.3 million visitors, according to the country’s Tourism Development Department. It got there by grouping visa exemptions for more than 30 countries and major markets over the Laos-China Railway, which significantly cut travel times from the Chinese borders. Both of them were delivered in the same campaign window. The Laotian experience can teach Nepal that a country comparably constrained by being landlocked and infrastructural deficits can welcome large magnitude tourists’ arrivals.

Sri Lanka is the closest structural mirror to Nepal among the three. It is a South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) peer with similar regional positioning and foreign exchange dependence on tourism. It crawled back from successive compounding shocks including 2019 Easter attacks, COVID-19, and 2022 sovereign debt-crisis to record 2.36 million arrivals in 2025, a 15.1% year-on-year increase. Yet Sri Lanka still missed its own revised target, cut mid-year from 3 million to 2.6 million, due to delayed launch of its national branding campaign and an unimplemented visa-free scheme for 47 countries, a pattern identical to Nepal’s ambitious positioning ahead of implementation mechanisms necessary to support it. More analytically, the average tourists daily spend was revised down from USD 171 (NPR 22,840) to USD 148 (NPR 19,768) by the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority (SLTDA) even when the visitor numbers grew by 4.2%, and on December 2025, the revenue fell by 14.8% year-on-year even, marking the country’s fourth revenue contraction within 6 months. Arrivals and yields do not move together in tandem and Nepal’s current plan risks treating them as if solving one solves both.

Can Visit Nepal 2085 Succeed?

It is difficult to foresee a successful Visit Nepal 2085 campaign with the current headline numbers. However, there are larger issues at hand. Nepali tourism will likely achieve 2.5 million arrivals organically by early 2030 regardless, going by the trend. The real test for the campaign is if it could build durable capacity, exit the EU blacklist, build new premium accommodations, recover the China market, and create a differentiated Devbhumi product that outlasts the campaign.

On that count, Visit Nepal 2085 is more important than its predecessors. The policy vision is not merely promotional. The Devbhumi framing of Nepal focusing on Lumbini, Pashupatinath, Janakpurdham, and Muktinath gives Nepal the edge in tourism that is difficult to replicate elsewhere in South Asia. Capitalizing on it as a product-building rehearsal, not just a branding exercise would attract longer-staying, higher-spending visitors and require far less five-star infrastructure than the broader arrivals target assumes. But there still is a sequencing risk. If the arrival target is treated as a goal rather than an infrastructure milestone and the campaign launches another branding launch instead of CAAN restructuring and signed airports co-management agreements, a similar pattern would repeat. The fruit is not hung impossibly high; Nepal just keeps announcing the harvest before a ladder is built.