This World Tourism Day, the official theme, “Digital Agenda and Artificial Intelligence to Redesign Tourism”, asks the sector to consider how artificial intelligence can support smarter, more inclusive and sustainable tourism. It also carries an important warning: digital progress matters only if its benefits reach travellers, workers, enterprises and communities.
For Nepal, this should be more than another global slogan. As travel planning increasingly moves from search boxes towards conversations with AI assistants, it raises a question of national competitiveness: Are we preparing tourism for the AI economy, or merely digitising old practices?
Imagine a traveller asking an AI assistant to design a ten-day journey through Nepal — culture rather than crowds, regional cuisine, comfortable walking, a spiritual experience, reliable accommodation and a destination suitable for winter. Will the answer include Badimalika, Rara, Dhorpatan or Humla? Will it introduce community homestays, pilgrimage routes, traditional food, wellness experiences and living cultural landscapes? Or will it return only the Nepal that is already internationally familiar?
The answer may depend not only on what Nepal offers, but on what the digital world can find, understand and trust.
A new gateway to travel
Nepal Tourism Board recorded 1,158,459 international visitor arrivals in 2025, about 96.8 per cent of the 2019 level. That recovery is important. But recovering visitor numbers does not necessarily mean Nepal is prepared for the next transformation in how journeys are imagined, compared and purchased.
That transformation is already visible. A 2025 Amadeus study of 9,500 travellers across seven markets found that the use of generative AI for travel planning had risen sharply. Travellers valued time savings, personalised recommendations and the discovery of new destinations. Yet one-quarter had also encountered outdated or inaccurate information.
Adobe’s 2026 analysis of US travel websites reinforces the direction of change. Traffic arriving from AI services increased substantially, while travellers used AI for research, inspiration, transport planning and itinerary creation. Adobe also found that parts of many travel websites were not readily interpretable by machines, weakening their visibility in AI-generated results.
These findings are not Nepal-specific, and they do not show that conventional search has disappeared. But they do demonstrate that AI is becoming an additional gateway through which destinations are discovered, evaluated and recommended.
In that environment, digital invisibility is a new form of remoteness.
This is an emerging challenge rather than an established statistical category. Geographic remoteness will continue to matter: roads, flights, communications, health facilities and emergency services remain fundamental. But a second form of remoteness is emerging. A destination can exist physically, possess extraordinary cultural and natural value, and still be absent from the digital systems through which travellers increasingly make decisions.
Nepal is more than its famous icons
Everest, Annapurna, Kathmandu, Pokhara, Chitwan and Lumbini are central to Nepal’s tourism identity. The challenge is not their visibility. It is whether the rest of Nepal can also be responsibly discovered.
Dhorpatan brings together protected landscapes, wildlife, walking and village-based accommodation. Badimalika links natural beauty with sacred geography and pilgrimage. Rara offers trekking, boating, birdlife and mountain scenery. Humla represents another dimension of Nepal whose experiences can be difficult for potential visitors to discover and assess through reliable digital information.
This is not an argument for promoting every destination immediately. Digital attention must be matched by safe access, conservation, sanitation, reliable services, community consent and credible visitor information. A destination can become visible on a screen much faster than it can develop the capacity to receive visitors responsibly.
Visibility, therefore, is not merely a marketing function. It is part of destination governance. Nepal must decide which places are promoted, what information accompanies that promotion, who verifies it, whether the destination is ready and how local people benefit when attention becomes visitation.
Nepal’s Tourism Policy 2025 already provides important direction. It identifies religious circuits, indigenous cuisine, cultural heritage, rural and community tourism, meditation, yoga, wellness, health tourism and multi-season experiences as areas for diversification. It also proposes multilingual digital promotion, classification-based destination profiles, structured tourism information and integrated digital services.
Nepal is not starting from a policy vacuum. The unresolved question is implementation.
Trust still comes before technology
AI can inspire travel, but trust determines whether a destination is chosen. A traveller considering Nepal may need answers to practical questions: Is the road open? Is the trail operational? Is a permit required? What accommodation is available? Where is the nearest health facility? Who should be contacted during an emergency? When was the information last verified?
The Tourism Policy acknowledges many of these needs through proposals for an integrated digital trekking-permit system, tourist assistance centres, a 24-hour helpline, improved signage, updated tourism information and public tourism services delivered through digital platforms.
The task is not simply to build another application. It is to connect these functions from the traveller’s perspective and establish clear responsibility for the information behind them. National agencies, provincial and local governments, protected areas, operators and communities should each maintain the information for which they are accountable.
Technology must also complement rather than replace human knowledge. An AI assistant cannot inspect a landslide, assess changing mountain conditions, repair a road, evacuate an injured traveller or determine whether a community is ready to receive guests. Guides, residents, local authorities, transport providers, accommodation operators and rescue services remain indispensable.
AI should help reliable local knowledge travel further. It should not create the illusion that local expertise is no longer necessary.
Begin with Governance, Not Software
Nepal’s digital tourism strategy should begin with trustworthy information and institutional capability. Destinations need verified profiles, multilingual content and consistent information on access, trails, permits, accommodation, events, safety and services. Information that changes quickly — weather disruptions, closures, road conditions or emergency contacts — must be updated, attributable and time-stamped.
Small tourism enterprises, homestays, guides and community organisations should not be expected to manage this transition alone. Digital transformation should expand their ability to communicate, maintain information and access markets without erasing their identity or transferring control over cultural representation to distant platforms.
Responsible AI also requires boundaries. Personal information must be protected. Digital systems must be secure. Recommendations should be transparent enough to examine for error or bias. Cultural knowledge should not be extracted, simplified or commercialised without respect for the people to whom it belongs. Human accountability must remain clear when automated information affects travel, safety or community reputation.
Success should therefore not be measured by how much content Nepal publishes or how many platforms it launches. The real tests are whether travellers receive more reliable answers, whether lesser-known destinations become responsibly discoverable, whether small enterprises can participate, and whether increased visibility creates fair local benefit.
AI will not replace Nepal’s mountains, cultures, hospitality, guides or communities, nor should it. Its significance lies in shaping the doorway through which travellers first encounter them.
Just as Nepal has spent decades reducing geographic remoteness through roads, airports, trails and communications, it must now address digital remoteness with equal seriousness.
On this World Tourism Day, the question is no longer only whether the world wants to visit Nepal. It is whether, when a future traveller asks an AI assistant where to go, the world’s algorithms can discover the full richness of Nepal — or only the Nepal that is already famous.
