The Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation is offering free visas to those foreign mountaineers in 2010 and 2011 who have already scaled Mount Everest in a bid to gain publicity for Nepal Tourism Year 2011 by word of mouth.

Similarly, the ministry has also waived royalty for mountaineers by 50 percent desiring to climb Dhaulagiri. As per the ministry new provision, the royalty for Dhaulagiri has been slashed to US$ 2,500 from US$ 5,000.

Both of the provision has come into effect and will be valid until the last month of 2011, said Ranjan Krishna Aryal, acting secretary at the Tourism Ministry. The move has been taken to boost tourism and promote the upcoming Nepal Tourism Year 2011, Aryal said. Aditya Baral, senior director and spokesperson at the Nepal Tourism Board (NTB), said Everest summiteers would be honoured as brand ambassadors.

He added that the NTB was planning to devise other effective programmes besides the existing ones to make Nepal known to the world as the perfect destination.

Mountains our prime marketable product and such initiatives will help reap positive benefits in such situation which the country is recently entangled with, said Ram Kaji Koney, past president of the Nepal Association of Tour and Travel Agents.

He said the recent interaction between the government and the opposition party had given some rays of hope to travel trade entrepreneurs that the situation would be improved. According to ministry records, 2,503 climbers (Nepalis and foreigners) have scaled Everest since New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa first climbed it in 1953. Last year,  the number of Everest summiteers was 178.

This spring so far, 86 mountaineering expeditions have received permits to make an attempt on different Himalayan peaks compared to 99 teams last year. The government has collected Rs. 195.7 million as royalty from different expeditions this year.