Summary Nepal Article

Relevant examples

Like mentioned in the first paragraph, this article is mainly focused on the Kingdom of Nepal. The authors use this country to describe the impact of terrorism, natural disasters and political instability on the tourism industry. Unfortunately, Nepal is not the only country in the world which suffer from such unpleasant incident. The most well-known confrontation with for example terrorism is probably the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City, also known as 9/11. Still, six years later, everyone knows what he or she was doing at the moment the news came out. The attacks where the mainstream in the media and governments all over the world. "America was attacked by a faceless coward", as president Bush said. But next to the fact that this was a shock for many people all over the world, the attacks also had a significant impact on the American tourism industy and even the World tourism industry. The attacks led to nearly a 20% cutback in air travel capacity, and severely exacerbated financial problems in the struggling U.S. airline industry (Bhadra, Dipasis and Texter, 2004). Furthermore, the higher-end of the hotel market declined from 92% of the rooms filled at an average rate of $230 before the attack to a 55% one week after the attack with a average rate of only $158 a night (www.usatoday.com).

Another example of a famous incident in world history was the Tsunami in December 2004. This natural disaster was caused by a large undersea earthquake near by Sumatra. This earthquake triggered several terrible tsunamis that where all heading towards the Indian coast. The results of this enormous natural disasters where tremendous. More than 229,866 where lost under which 186,983 dead and 42,883 still missed (www.tsunamispecialenvoy.org). Next to that, the effects of the Tsunami on the tourism industry in countries like Thailand where enormous. In January 2004, more than 1,200,000 tourists visited Thailand compared with only approximately 800,000 tourist in January 2005. Furthermore, only 33% of the hotel rooms where filled in the period January-march 2005, whereas almost 70% is the normal range (Birkland, EERI, Herabat, Little and Wallace, 2006).

Implications for managers

The article describes several actions which where undertaken by the Nepal Tourism Board (NTB) and by the government itself. In addition to that, several examples of other countries where mentioned as well. The implications described in the article are all very interesting for business managers as well as for governments all over the world. Since both companies and complete nations can be victim of negative publicity caused by unexpected incidents, the information in this article can be seen as practical and valuable.

After the decline in tourism during 2001 and