More: Global airline profits forecasts downgraded by 21%
Nepal hosted the first Asian Resilience Summit at the end of last week and heard the head of a trekking company denounce the recent media depiction of Everest.
Dawa Steven Sherpa, managing director of Asian Trekking, told the conference in Kathmandu the photograph of climbers queueing to reach the summit of Everest “could have been avoided”.
Referring to “the so-called traffic jam on Everest” that accompanied reports of the recent high number of deaths among climbers on the mountain, he said: “How the photo on May 22 showed our country could have been avoided. It was just one period of three hours.
“I was there at 8,000 metres, talking to operators trying to coordinate operations. There were a lot of problems with people not sharing information. If the ministry of tourism had the information from people that would not have happened.”
He added: “We’ve been running a clean-up campaign on Everest since 2006. The big change this year is the local municipality has done a cleaning campaign for the first time with the WWF and the army. It removed over 3000 kg of rubbish off Everest.
“Everest is getting cleaner not dirtier.”
Earlier, former UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) secretary general Taleb Rifai, who chairs the Global Travel and Tourism Resilience Council (GTTRC) which organised the summit, said: “Tourism is a vulnerable industry, but it recovers well from any crisis if it has a strong base.”
Xu Jing, UNWTO regional director for Asia-Pacific, said: “We want to see resilience lead a step further – not only to how destinations recover but to go beyond recovery.”
He added: “When it comes to a time of crisis, we need to be heard as a collective voice or nothing will be heard.”
Daniela Wagner, co-founder of the GTTRC, told the summit: “We can’t stop things going wrong or provide solutions to every problem, but we can create a global platform for sharing solutions.
“We can establish a dialogue so public and private sectors can talk to one another and break down the barriers between sectors and destinations.”
Mohan Krishna Sapkota, secretary of Nepal’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation, described the impact of the 2015 earthquake on the country, and said: “800,000 houses and some major tourist sites suffered.”
But he pledged the reconstruction effort would be completed in two years.
Yogendra Shakya, managing director of Ace Hotels, said: “Nepal is always in the media for the wrong reasons.
“We are hungry to be seen by the outside world, but unless there is a crisis, I don’t think we can get the BBC to come to Nepal.”
Raj Gyawali, managing director of Social Tours, agreed saying: “The BBC and CNN came the day after the earthquake, got picked up in nice cars at the airport and taken to a luxury hotel and then filmed ruined buildings for seven days. That killed our tourism.”
However, Nepal Tourism Board chief executive Deepak Raj Joshi hailed the benefits of the summit, saying: “It highlights Nepal as a destination.”