Post-Disaster Tourism Recovery in Nepal: A Review of Resilience Frameworks and Lessons from the 2015 Earthquake and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

In the relatively short period of five years alone, the tourism industry in Nepal has suffered two of the biggest shocks in its contemporary history; the Nepal Gorkha earthquake of 2015 and the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic. Collectively, the two incidents trampled down tourist inflows, livelihoods, and infrastructure, heritage sites and the entire economy. In this paper, the existing literature on the recovery of Nepal tourism in the aftermath of the disaster is reviewed in the context of the existing resilience and crisis management models. Based on the peer reviewed articles, institutional reports and policy documents published between 2015 and 2024, the paper synthesises the peer reviewed articles, institutional reports, and policy documents. The review concludes that in the wake of the earthquake that wiped out about half of Nepal’s nominal GDP and damaged heritage infrastructure in dozens of districts, tourism has recovered rapidly and has even exceeded pre-disaster levels of arrivals. The pandemic, in turn, caused a more profound, and lasting collapse, with a slow increase toward pre-pandemic levels by the mid-2020s. The destination marketing, multi-stakeholder coordination, community-led resilience, volunteer tourism as a niche segment, heritage-led recovery and the Build Back Better philosophy are recurrent enablers of recovery. The persistence of challenges such as poor crisis preparedness, slow heritage reconstruction, over-reliance on one source-market, low per-tourist spending, poor infrastructure, and uneven distribution of benefits of recovery have been persistent obstacles to recovery promotion. The paper suggests a combined resilience model to the tourism sector in Nepal and outlines the future research direction, arguing that to convert recovery into a true resilience, long-term structural support, participatory governance, and structural flexibility are all required.