Nepal’s tourism season collides with a flood aftershock

September is usually the month when Nepal’s tourism machine starts to hum. This year, it is making a far less cheerful sound: the scrape of cancelled bookings, stalled vehicles and cash registers that do not ring often enough. The reason is painfully simple. Last month’s floods, triggered by a glacial mountain collapse along the Nepal-Tibet border, killed more than 1,450 people and cut through the country’s transport links just as the high season was about to begin.

For Pushpraj Rimal, a tour planner and taxi driver in Kathmandu, the season has barely started and already feels finished. He earns commissions from hotels and trekking companies in Kathmandu and Pokhara, the lake town that serves as a base for Himalayan trekkers. Instead of a busy September, he says most foreign tourists cancelled after the disaster, leaving him with only a quarter of his usual business. He had rented two cars for two months; now he is waiting for the season to end, which is not the same thing as waiting for prosperity.

The damage goes well beyond the capital. Nepal’s tourism industry accounts for nearly 8 percent of gross domestic product and employs more than 1 million people. Last year, the country received more than 1.15 million visitors, with nearly a third arriving between September and November. That is precisely why the floods hurt so much: they arrived at the one moment when Nepal needed clear roads, clear skies and a bit of confidence from the outside world.

Confidence, however, is fragile. Some travellers cancelled outright after checking advisories from their embassies. The United Kingdom warned on September 11 that many areas had become unstable and safe travel within Nepal could not be guaranteed. The US embassy issued a similar warning, saying many areas were unsafe and identifying no-travel zones. The Indian embassy took a different line, saying Nepal was open and safe and that only some areas needed to be avoided. In practice, nuance is often the first casualty of a travel warning.

In Chitwan, about 150 kilometres from Kathmandu’s airport, resort worker Pramila Chhetri says 80 percent of her bookings vanished within hours of the floods because the main highway was damaged and then closed for nearly two weeks. She had stocked rooms, hired staff and bought supplies for what should have been a full month. Instead, she says the resort is already deep in loss, and even the unaffected parts of the country are bracing for what she calls a disastrous season.

The pain is visible on the roadside as well. Seeta Nepali and her husband, Ramakant, sell homemade buttermilk on the highway linking Kathmandu with Pokhara and Chitwan. When the road was blocked, they earned nothing for 11 days. Even after it reopened, traffic remained thin and many vehicles were restricted. Now they are back at work, but at barely a quarter of normal income. Lunch, Seeta says, has been reduced to flattened rice and buttermilk. Tourism may be a sectoral statistic in official reports; for them, it is the difference between eating properly and hoping the road fills with strangers.

Some visitors changed plans rather than cancelling them altogether. A British traveller who had planned to visit Pokhara and Dhulikhel with friends called off the trip after learning of the disaster. A Japanese father said the state of the roads was not his main concern; the flood aftermath itself was enough to make him stay away. An Indian traveller, by contrast, shortened his plans and stayed in Kathmandu instead of going to Pokhara. That is the pattern Nepal now faces: not a total shutdown, but a steady thinning of demand, one reservation at a time.

The country’s officials insist that the message should not be confused. The problem is not all of Nepal, only the parts hit by floods and the roads that connect them. Yet the market rarely behaves with such precision. A damaged highway in one district can empty hotel rooms in another. A warning meant for one stretch of territory can spook travellers into cancelling the whole trip. Nepal’s businesses, especially the small ones, are paying for that misunderstanding now. And they are doing so in the oldest way possible: by counting what did not arrive.

Written by Thorben Thiede thorben.thiede@alpineweekly.com