For three days of the Pokhara street festival from December 30 to January 1, hotels and restaurants in Pokhara had a field day. Almost all the hotels were full and restaurants were packed with local visitors. “Still, it was like old days,” a visibly beaming hotelier said.

The street festival was the conclusion of the 4-month-long Festive Pokhara – forerunner to the year-long ‘Jaun Hai Pokhara’. The tree-day street festival left a positive symptom for the tourism entrepreneurs.

Earlier, hoteliers and other tourism entrepreneurs used to neglect local customers with their eyes mainly focussed on foreign tourists, but in recent days with the flow of foreign tourists left to a trickle, tourism entrepreneurs have started seeing domestic visitors as the saviour to the beleaguered tourism industry in Pokhara. The arrival of foreign tourists to Pokhara has declined by 70 to 80 per cent.

It was only after they reached to morbid condition their attention and attitude has changed, and they have started attracting Nepali tourists to survive the ‘winter’ of Nepalese tourism.

Hoteliers located around the Lake Side, the prime tourist destination, have started to provide better service to their Nepali clients.

Hari Prasad Gurung, Regional Chairman of Hotel Association of Nepal, and proprietor of Hotel Hungry Hai, told The Rising Nepal that the overall security situation needs to improve for the tourism industry to survive. “Unless that is done and the image of a peaceful destination is restored, programmes only will not bring in the tourists,” he said.

However, he accepted that the street festival and the ‘Jaun Hai Pokhara’ (Let’s go to Pokhara) could help to buffer the situation before the industry revives.

Elaborating the ‘Jaun Hai Pokhara’, Gurung said that there will be a week-long special programme at the end of this month in different parts of the country like Kathmandu, Birgunj, Dharan and Biratnagar.

According to Gurung, a joint team of tourism entrepreneurs, the Nepal Tourism Board and other business entrepreneurs will organise an exhibition at Bhrikutimandap of Kathmandu from January 31 and February 1.

The exhibition will have art and handicraft exhibition, folk song and dance programme, food festival including special cuisine of potato and Sukuti (dried meat), and dohori geet competition.