High-end resorts revive luxury tourism
Deluxe hotels in bid to reshape nation’s image as budget travel destination
The windswept valley of Jomsom in the once-forbidden kingdom of Mustang is tucked between barren hills and the towering Himalayas in north-central Nepal. Once a transit point for traders to Tibet, the sleepy village has since turned into a rest stop for Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims visiting Muktinath Temple and trekkers encircling Annapurna mountain.
Now, a new resort is reinventing Jomsom as a luxury destination, developing high-value tourism in one of Nepal’s most remote yet environmentally and culturally diverse regions. Shinta Mani Mustang, a boutique hotel designed by American architect Bill Bensley, aims to offer “comfortable and stylish” accommodation in an offbeat location, while reimagining Nepal’s image as a cheap holiday spot for backpackers.
“Hospitality in the Himalayas has not changed very much in the past 30 years,” said Jason Friedman, who brought the Shinta Mani brand to Nepal alongside the local Sherpa Hospitality Group last year.
“We are allowing a whole new demographic of travellers to access these areas.”
When Friedman first visited Nepal – and Jomsom – three decades ago, the country was on the cusp of democratic reforms, with Mustang only opening up to foreign visitors in 1992. But a decade-long Maoist insurgency to end monarchy and feudalism that began in 1996 hit the country’s tourism, one of its major revenue-generating sectors.
Nepal’s tourism industry has mostly bounced back, contributing 6.7 per cent to gross domestic product in 2022, according to data from the World Bank.
Last year, Nepal welcomed more than 1 million tourists – for only the third time in the country’s history – and data for March showed a nearly 30 per cent yearon-year increase in visitor numbers, with tourists from neighbouring India and China leading the pack.
Tourist spending remains low, however, with travellers only forking out US$40.50 per day in 2022 compared with US$48 in 2021, according to the latest available data from Nepal’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation. In recent decades, Nepal has largely been perceived as a budget backpacking destination, while nearby Bhutan has branded itself as the premium Himalayan hotspot.
But it was not always like that. Nepal rose to prominence on the world stage when Nepali-New Zealander pair Tenzing Norgay Sherpa and Edmund Hillary made the historic first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953. But it was not until two years later that the first organised tour group landed in capital Kathmandu.
The country’s first luxury accommodation was the Royal Hotel – known today as Yak & Yeti. It was opened in 1951 by Russian hotelier Boris Lisanevich, a pioneering figure in Nepal’s tourism industry, in a palace previously owned by the now-dissolved Rana dynasty, which controlled the Himalayan kingdom for more than a century.
In the following decades, Nepal witnessed the birth of some of its most successful domestic high-end brands.
In the 1960s, local five-star hotels such as Hotel Annapurna and Soaltee opened. British adventurer Jim Edwards turned Tiger Tops in southern Nepal into one of South Asia’s pioneering, premium wildlife tourism spots in the following decade, with businessman Dwarika Das Shrestha’s namesake hotel, Dwarika’s, becoming a landmark luxury property showcasing Kathmandu’s architecture.
High-paying tourists were lured by the hard-to-access Himalayan nation’s mythical, mysterious charm. Then came the celebrities, from Hollywood actors Richard Gere and Keanu Reeves, to singers Mick Jagger, Ricky Martin and Sting.
Lisa Choegyal, a sustainable tourism consultant with 50 years of experience in Nepal, said the country used to be “a glamorous destination and a fashionable place to be”. “In Asia, most of the tourism circuits developed with foreign independent travellers
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Nepal welcomed more than this many tourists last year, with visitors from neighbouring India and China leading the pack
and then the high-end groups,” she said. “Nepal started the other way round. It was a very unusual travel pattern.”
A royal trek by Britain’s Prince Charles – now King Charles – in 1980 through the foothills of the Annapurna, plus a stopover by Prince Philip at Tiger Tops in 1986, further elevated Nepal’s status on the global tourism map.
In 1998, Tiger Mountain Pokhara Lodge, another high-end property overlooking the magnificent fishtail-like Mount Machhapuchchhre, opened along the route that Prince Charles had trekked.
“Nepal in those days had quite a spectrum of [tourism] markets and that is where we need to get back to,” said Choegyal, who is also the director of Tiger Mountain Pokhara Lodge. “That’s why it’s exciting that Shinta Mani have partnered with Sherpa Hospitality to bring their name. I used to think we could do it ourselves but we need the branded hotels and the marketing that comes with them.”
Perched on a hill overlooking Jomsom, some 2,800 metres above sea level and facing the Nilgiri and Dhaulagiri peaks, Shinta Mani Mustang is one of the most ambitious projects to launch in Nepal recently. With stone exteriors that blend into the backdrop of barren hills, and interiors that incorporate local hues and motifs, the resort pays homage to the region’s heritage and culture.
Industry insiders said a relatively stable political environment – despite frequent changes of leadership and certain investment policies that required fine-tuning – had encouraged investors to set up high-end properties across Nepal. They see this as Nepal’s luxury tourism renaissance, and hope to attract not just Westerners but also high spenders from India, mainland China, Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore.