257,181 Visitor Arrivals only by Air in September 2008

Bordering neighbor India, the largest tourist generating market for Nepal showed remarkable growth of 14% in September. The South Asian region has gained overall positive growth of 13% with Bangladesh (3%) and Sri Lanka (8%), except the arrivals from Pakistan that have decreased by 8%. Similarly, other Asian countries like China, Singapore and Malaysia have kept up the upward trend with 8%, 29% and 35% of growth respectively in each market. Israel, France, Australia and Norway have also maintained the increasing trend in the arrival figures. Arrivals from the United States of America and Canada have also increased in September compared to the same month last year.

However, other major markets such as Japan, South Korea and Thailand saw disappointing result in the arrival figures down by 21%, 40% and 7% respectively. European arrivals also suffered a significant decline with UK (9%), Italy (35%), Germany (20%) and Spain (13%).