1. The document discusses tourism as a potential frontier for Nepal's experience economy. It argues that tourism could be a more feasible sector for Nepal to develop compared to industry or manufacturing, given its natural advantages and gifts in tourism. 2. It reviews the evolution of the experience economy concept and how tourism is a dominant frontier within the experience economy. Principles of appreciative inquiry, participatory planning and action, and sustainable tourism development are discussed as important approaches. 3. Tourism is described as offering memorable experiences and defying traditional commodity exchanges. Models are presented for how adventure tourism could spatially and economically integrate remote areas in Nepal into the global tourism economy.

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Tourism as a Frontier of Experience Economy in Nepal
Chanakya P Rijal, PhD
Abstract: Nepal, being one of the least developed nations in the world and itself having a very
little socio-economic and geo-political influence over rest of the world, has to take a few serious
early steps. Development and promotion of mining, manufacturing and production intensive
industry may not be feasible for Nepal due to many reasons. At this point, it is quite imperative
to explore and strengthen some areas in which it has sustainable footage and also bears the
interest of the entire world. Among such areas, promotion of tourism sector could be considered
as one of the most feasible sectors as it has been naturally gifted to Nepal.
Since the entire world of business has been shifting its focus from more traditional, production
intensive system to more flexible and memorable service intensity, promotion of tourism as a
major business of Nepal could serve quite instrumental to project Nepal from the ‘nowhere’
position to one of the ‘leading’ nations in the world of business. Thus, the present scholar has
attempted to establish a few reflections to confirm tourism as one of the frontiers of experience
economy of Nepal.
However, the present scholar does not guarantee imparting complete knowledge about the
chosen area of this work. It was done so with a good reason – it will at least insist them to
commence exploring the authenticity of scoping Nepal as a source country of experience
economy for rest of the world. In fact, Nepal is already very late to take the first steps in writing
its position in the world economy.
Key Words: Experience economy; principles of appreciative inquiry, planning and action;
sustainable tourism development; aims of experience economy.
Methodology of works: As part of qualitative discourse, this work has been primarily based on
an extensive review of existing literature in the area of experience economy where tourism and
hospitality sectors being the dominant areas of observation in the Nepalese and other similar
contexts. This article is a part of present scholar’s ongoing works on scoping Nepal’s prospect to
be promoted as a source country of a number of experience economy related variants.
Rationale of the work: The idea of writing this article as a link to learn about promoting Nepal
as one of the promising source destinations in experience economy with focus on tourism and
hospitality industries. For this, the present scholar made an idea to connect such an important
issue with an annual publication of Nepal Academy of Tourism and Hotel Management
(NATHM). This work has been expected to serve as an integrated source of learning for various
concerned agencies including the students, higher education teachers, explorers, national and
international policy makers, and many others having concern in promoting the richness of the
prospect of Nepalese tourism and hospitality business as one of the core drivers of experience
economy of the Himalayan country admiring the rest of the world, naturally… forever.
About the scholar: Chanakya P. Rijal holds a PhD degree in Leadership from Kathmandu
University, Nepal after obtaining an MBA degree from Maastricht School of Management, The
Netherlands. Dr Rijal has earned several diplomas specializing in corporate communications,

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institutional governance, computing, strategic thinking, and teaching pedagogies. In his career
span of about 25 years, he has an extensive experience of establishing and promoting a number
of successful education institutions in Nepal. He has worked for teaching right from pre-primary
to doctoral levels, worked for establishing the national policies and relevant benchmarks on
research and quality assurance and accreditation (QAA) system in Nepal, worked as a freelance
expert for research and innovation, professional development, social welfare initiatives and
academic writing. Dr Rijal also holds proven expertise in systems thinking for holistic
development. He has executed many assignments with specialization in project planning,
implementation, monitoring and evaluation, sustainable development, new business development
and truthful branding of products and services. Presently, Dr Rijal works at Nepal College of
Management, affiliated to Kathmandu University, as the Head of Research and Development,
and also plays advisory roles for academic and institutional development. Dr Rijal can be
reached via rijalcpr@gmail.com.
Preamble: In a more recent work, Rijal (2014) has claimed, “As a purely independent and
indigenous practice, the tourism industry, in any context, should not be governed either by the
government or the market forces injected from outside. To achieve a more sustainable form of
tourism, it should rather be successfully driven by self-regulation as being the best way forward
for rest of the world” (p. 67). In tourism, each visitor has his or her unique expectation from the
destinations visited and the perceived memory of experience after the visit should be uniquely
lasting and pleasing one, for life.
Tourism is an industry which is not only fastest growing but also creating shared happiness
globally as a gift of developing countries, primarily in the mountainous areas, which are often
rich in traditional and minority cultures, biological diversity and rest of natural beauty as well as
mystery. For example, Chitral Association for Mountain Area Tourism ([CAMAT], 2003) has
claimed that many mountainous regions are safe-havens for traditional cultures, architecture,
religions, beliefs and traditional knowledge. These places are also important in environmental
terms as they are havens of biological diversity and conserve much rare or endangered plant and
animal species and also a large part of the world’s renewable clean scenic water resources are
formed and stored in these areas making them prime tourist destinations (CAMAT, 2003).
According to CAMAT (2003), about 40 percent of all natural world heritage sites and over 42
percent of all biosphere reserves are located in the mountain areas. In fact, Nepal is the primary
source destination in this respect. The World Tourism Organization ([WTO], 2005) has termed
tourism as an activity that has grown by around 25 percent globally in the past 10 years in
1990s, by holding almost 10 percent of the world’s economic activity and also providing with
dominant role in generating the employment worldwide. McMinn (1997) also has agreed on this
reality of tourism being the world’s largest industry as it employs one out of each nine
employees with approximately 6 percent of the global gross national profit (GNP) generation,
serving as a panacea for the third-world countries to resolve their numerous socio-economic
problems. At the same time, it is observed that tourism, especially the mountain tourism, also it
may have multi-fold, critical impacts on natural and built environments and on the wellbeing and
culture of the host populations (McMinn, 1997). Thus, it requires closer attention from the
constructivist point of view too.

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WTO (2005) has revealed that the concept of systematic approach to sustainable tourism
development commenced in around 1980s and today it has become one of the major focuses of
each member state and respective community globally as the way to a better future whereby the
governments, respective communities and other immediate beneficiary stakeholders are made
more responsible and accountable in this noble mission. There are many advocacies that the
policies to promote sustainable development should take full account of the opportunities offered
by the tourism.
On the other hand, it is a bitter fact that Nepal cannot be promoted as a high consumption,
industrial production destination as its international linkage to production and marketing value
chains is quite limited with relatively lower domestic production and consumption. Thus, there is
an immense need of an assessment to identify and cash on what the country is better off.
Apparently, as gifted by the nature, Nepal may have tremendous potential for at least three
sectors – tourism, agriculture and hydropower (Rijal, 2014b). So, the national developmental
emphasis must be on effective promotion of these three sectors and the national development
priorities must address the issue of sustainable development and promotion of these nature gifted
sectors.
Also from the perspective of sustainable resource management, production and marketing, these
sectors may have higher advantage. According to Chowdhury (2013), more than 1 million
tourists visiting to Nepal annually have daily per capita spending of above US $ 100. Since the
country is regarded as one of the authentic and ethnic tourism destinations, it has witnessed itself
as one of the foreign direct investment (FDI) and power surplus nations in the world. As a result,
tourism in Nepal has become a point of attraction for the global investors. In fact, tourism may
be promoted as an integrated element for the promotion of water and agricultural prospects too,
visualizes Rijal (2014b).
Evolution of experience economy: Many scholars have attempted to project the evolution of
services as the source of evolution of service economy and they have acknowledged that the
early industrial revolution era between mid-eighteenth century to its end won the world of
business attention on ‘production’ concept as there were only a few firms producing the
commodities to meet the demand of the total global population (Rijal, 2014c; Keelson, 2012; &
Kotler, & Armstrong, 2009) making mass production as the most feasible ideology of doing
business in those days. But in course of time, such a situation influenced more people,
governments and other institutions to come into the world of business by the advent of more
competitive business development in early 1900s to till 1950s, as the competition emerged
among the firms and gradually resulted in evolution of competition imperfection. It forced the
industry to revisit its ‘production orientation’ by adding another concept ‘product orientation’ as
the public and private enterprises perceived that mass production alone was not enough to
address the growing competition because the consumers had already become choosy and product
quality was considered as a means of cross-product comparison. Thus, the focus on product
concept emphasized quality orientation of the firms and the product quality became the means of
fighting in competition, which ultimately added onto the increasing level of quality
consciousness among the firms and consumers. Following this, gradually emerged a series of
other philosophies of doing business including selling concept, marketing and communications

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concept, customer orientation, societal marketing concept and finally, the holistic marketing
concept till reaching to the early twenty first century.
Another beauty of evolution of these concepts is that in each stage of evolution, the newer
concepts evolved as an additional, supplementary concept to be nourished along the earlier
existed concepts. As a result, the entire philosophy of managing the world of business could
flourish. On the other hand, such a development over time pushed up the transformation of
traditional four Ps (product, place, price and promotion) of the marketing mix elements into 7 Ps
(product, place, price, promotion, people, processes, physical evidence of operations) in a more
service dominated economy, again as a supplementary thematic evolution of business (Rijal,
2014c; & Loveluck, Wirtz, & Chatterjee, 2011) and ‘service’ became an integral component of
each type of business.
In the discourse of the present day business, it has been found to be benefitted significantly as a
result of emergence of a highly noble concept of transforming the diversity of services within
tangible classifications and tourism has emerged as one of the globally recognized sources of
business priorities. Tourism has been considered as one of the purest forms of experiential
economy worldwide. For example, Pine and Gilmore (1998) have defined ‘experience economy’
as the final phase of an economic progression to mark the early twenty first century. As it has
been discussed earlier, it evolved through the phases of commodities, goods, services economies,
and finally stage of memorable experience of the services received.
In fact, experience economy applies equally to all sectors of business. Say, for example, an
automobile retailer would like to serve with an impression to create a realization of being at the
helping hands. Similarly, the customers of a retail stores should feel being cared of their product
needs. An airline’s passengers should get to be exposed with a safe, comfortable and welcoming
journey, and similar should be the memories of travelers to a destination after their journey is
over. These are a few examples of experiences – the memories of the felt wellbeing.
Further, pioneering in their work on ‘experience economy’ Pine and Gilmore (1998) have
presented this concept as the ‘stage’ function of economy. In their proposition, the scholars have
presented experience as an economics’ role and it has been claimed that the nature of offering is
memorable in experiential service economy. Such a memory is attached with the ‘personal
attributes’ of the beholder of memory on received services. The method of supply of service is
revealed over a period of time on full realization or recollection of experience. The seller plays a
role of stager. The buyer acts as a guest whereby the perceived sensation serves as the factors
generating demand. The assumption is that better service delivery may generate positive
sensation on services delivered. In other words, it is a real perception made by the consumer after
having experience of the marketing offerings (Rijal, 2014a). In tourism, all what the firm sells is
the memorable experience to the guests -- higher the degree of positive experience of the
services delivered, higher would be the prospect of business sustainability of such an offering
(Rijal, 2014c).
Tourism as a dominant frontier in experience economy: Tourism, more specifically the
mountain tourism, is synonymous to adventure travel and it is one of the fastest growing but least
understood forms of international and intercultural tourism product mix which may have

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tremendous scope for the economic development of remote places with lasting impacts on local
society, economy, and the environment as a whole. Many of the scholars are of the opinion that
tourism is synonymous to experience economy and it defies the norms of traditional commodity
exchanges (Zurick, 1992; & Jack, & Phipps, 2005). As it is a part of experience economy, it
requires a deeply touching ‘effect’ to confirm a more sensible and memorable moment for
everybody experiencing it.
Zurick (1992) has proposed an adventure travel spatial-linkage model as a tool to connect
Nepal’s remote frontiers with the global tourism economy. The model confirms that the
adventure tourists move through a hierarchy of travel gateways before reaching the adventure
destinations of their choices, mostly located in isolated and subsistence population areas.
According to this scholar, such a movement of the visitors produces a unique structure of tourism
space contributing to the formation in Nepal of regional developments such as hilltown
gateways, hinterland tourism destinations, and multi-use parklands. This scholar has also
suggested with an adventure tourism impact model to address the tourism related problems
associated with exceeding social and environmental carrying capacities with resolute positive
impacts linked to converging in the national economy, indigenous populations, tourists, and
conservation development works. Of course, with its steady growth, adventure tourism in Nepal
will play an increasingly important role for national and local development in the frontier areas.
In a more recent work, Rijal (2014c) has proposed sustainable tourism development to be
promoted as a holistic means of prosperity social footed with at least four principles –
1. integration of the ideas of holistic planning, cross-sectoral planning and strategy making,
2. emphasis on importance of preserving essential ecological processes,
3. need to protect both human heritage and biodiversity, and
4. requirements that development should be carried out such that the productivity does not
deplete resources for the long-term, future generations.
For this, the nation may require a long-term shared vision, national commitment, public-private
collective efforts, and defined priority of the country on its agenda of tourism development. It is
equally important to educate more people with tourism specific skill competence and
willingness, revisit in the traditional education system, leveraging communication, transportation
and accommodation facilities and developing other required infrastructure in major destinations.
In fact, very fast development of China, South Korea, Singapore and HongKong may be
regarded as the best examples of such transformation in Asia by promoting the national drivers
of socio-economic development (Rijal, 2014b) – tourism, agriculture and water resources in
context of Nepal. Among these requisites too, the development of tourism should be regarded as
the primary driver as it would leverage the wisdom, liberation, envisioning, empowerment,
commitment, conceptual and technical competence and leadership strength required for ideation,
planning, development and promotion of rest of sectors, making Nepal as a global travel
destination.
CAMAT (2003) has suggested with at least three principles of appreciative participatory
planning and action as the roots of success in the process of recognizing and promoting
experience economic endeavors. These principles include as follows:

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Principle1: Focus on finding and building upon the root causes of success and motivation among
participants as individuals and groups by applying an appreciative inquiry approach throughout
the planning and management cycle of discovery, dream, design and delivery (4Ds) that builds
upon valuable capacities, resources and life-giving attributes. According to CAMAT (2003) an
effective appreciative inquiry based approach should be rooted on first finding a success story of
local enterprise and conservation work, and then making the community working together for a
shared vision to promote tourism in the localities, and finally exploring the ways to strengthening
the success, things and the memorable ways the people feel proud about.
Principle 2: Induce a more participatory learning as a guiding process to success as it empowers
people through acquiring and affirming knowledge, and through building ownership of jointly
planned actions. Participatory learning should not only be confined to solving social problems,
but also a similar approach can be adopted during the evaluation of community conservation and
ecotourism activities, when the focus should be to explore and learn what worked well, and what
needs be improved.
Principle 3: Gear up the confirmation of sustainability by means of effective built and
mobilization of local participants with fuller use of their dreams, skills, resources and collective
attainments of the resources and communities for which actions are planned.
Tourism development for sustainable experience economy: Since very long, International
Labor Organization (ILO) has been maintaining its leadership position for generous contribution
to promote many sustainable ways to promote the societies in the world of humanity. In this
discourse, ILO (2010) has suggested with a three-pillar proposition of sustainable tourism
development and promotion in which it focuses on maintenance of social justice, economic
development and environmental integrity.
Other many scholars are of the opinion that sustainable tourism development must be initiated
with optimal use of environmental resources that constitute a key element in tourism
development, maintaining essential ecological processes and helping to conserve natural
resources and biodiversity. Respecting the socio-cultural authenticity of the host communities by
means of conservation of their built and living cultural heritages and traditional values, and
contribution to inter-cultural understanding and tolerance also play important roles. Equally
important is to ensure viable, long-term economic operations by providing socio-economic
benefits to all stakeholders that are fairly distributed, including stable employment and income-
earning opportunities and social services to host communities, and contributing to poverty
alleviation. Equally important aspect linked to sustainable tourism development is that it may not
be sustained unless the concerned agencies are able to make it a common mission with shared
commitment for the development and promotion (Rijal, 2011; Bertels, Papania, & Papania 2010;
& Kunwar, 2010) in long-runs with their vested ownership.
Conclusions: The mission of tourism development in Nepal should be initiated with holistic
coverage of experience economy as a major driver of national economic development and
wellbeing by means of fuller exploitation of its potential to – 1. generate economic viability of
the local destinations, 2. empower local prosperity by investing back the travel revenue earned
by different destinations, 3. promote the local employment in terms of quality and quantity, 4.

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promote social equity in respect with the state pay off of visitor economy surplus, 5. reward with
visitors’ perceived fulfillment, 6. capacitate and maintain local control over opportunities and
resources, 7. promote the community wellbeing within and beyond tourism initiatives, 8. explore
and promote the cultural richness of the local destinations, 9. maintain physical integrity of the
locality by means of both social collaborations and physical infrastructure connectivity, 10.
promote the development and protection of biological diversity in the localities, 11. improve the
efficiency of development, consumption and conservation of local resources, and 12. contribute
significantly in maintaining environmental purity of the destinations so as to make the places to
be able to keep on appealing the visitors for travel with the spirit ‘visiting once is not enough in
naturally Nepal’.
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