Affordable luxury

TRAVEL: Nepal wants the affluent traveller and is pulling out all stops to bring him in.

Nepal is India's closest "foreign" country where the draws have been as much cultural as shopping and gambling. But upmarket? Hardly.

That perception is set to change, though. After a few years of turmoil beginning with the Indian Airlines flight 814 that was hijacked on the Kathmandu-Delhi leg (to Kandahar), and up until the overthrow of the monarchy, the publicity has all been negative.

Even otherwise, Nepal wasn't where you went for some pampered travelling. This was strictly B zone "" for cut-rate package holidays, with casinos and cheap booze thrown in for good measure.

But the Nepal Tourism Board's new tourism worldwide campaign could change that and position it as a "safe" destination once again.

The days of being scared are over, says its official website, quite innovatively at that. Log on to the website and it points to a series of articles and blogs with comments from those who have recently travelled to the country. The verdict? Nepal is, um, safe.

The board unveiled the campaign in March 2006, and there has been a 10 per cent increase in the number of Indians coming in since "" 96,000 Indians visited Nepal by air in 2005, and this year the tourism board hopes to increase that number to 1,15,000. (Though that's still a far cry from the numbers that thronged back in the roaring eighties and early nineties.)

The campaign, developed by Alchemy Social Infrastructure, has its punchlines all worked out "" "Unleash Yourself"; "Naturally Nepal"; "Once Is Not Enough" "" aimed at giving Nepal a fresh boost. Agency partners Arun Anand and Rahul Sen say they have conceptualised their target customer as the "cosmopolitan international tourist" who is also an "enterprising citizen".

The target includes 35 prominent cosmopolitan world cities, and over the next 10 years, 80 per cent of the marketing budget will be spent on these.

Nandini Lahe Thapa, director, marketing and promotion, NTB, who was in India recently, is unequivocal that instead of spreading its resources thin through scattered marketing, the campaign will target specific segments.

"From India, we realised we do not need to promote religious tourism. People come on their own without any kind of publicity," avers Thapa. Other initiatives include a host-n-dost hospitality programme, seeking to employ Nepali youth as hosts for any visiting tourist, on request.

A promotion unique to India is plugging weekend getaways, for which the board has first tested the waters in Delhi, spending Rs 1 crore on Gurgaon and south Delhi on targeting families, BPOs and the software crowd, through promotions at PVR as well as Cafe Coffee Day outlets.

Finally, too, Nepal equals adventure, at least in popular perception, and the board is targetting the leisure segment with "Girls only", "wild stag" and "super adventure" weekends.

It may be building up attitude, but the best part about a holiday in Nepal is still its affordability.