Over 55,000 tourists visited Nepal in January

KATHMANDU: Nepal welcomed 55,074 foreign tourists via air in January.

According to Nepal Tourism Board (NTB), India continued to be the largest source market of foreign tourists for Nepal in the first month of 2023 as 16,436 tourists from the southern neighbor visited Nepal in January. Next on the list were the US with 6,561 tourists, Australia with 3,441 and Bangladesh with 2,468 tourists.

The strong growth in tourist numbers in January hints that the pandemic-hit industry is gradually returning to normalcy. Nepal welcomed 16,436 tourists via air in January, 2022 and 8,674 in January, 2021. Similarly, 79,686 foreign tourists visited Nepal in January, 2020, before the COVID pandemic threw the world out of gear.

The total number of arrivals in 2022 was 614,148, compared to 1.19 million in 2019.