More foreign tourists can relieve dollar crisis: tour operators

More foreign tourists can relieve the country's ongoing dollar crisis, says the Tour Operators Association of Bangladesh (Toab).

"Our campaigns for attracting foreign tourists are not adequate although we have the potential of having a substantial number of inbound tourists and earn a lot of foreign currency. In a recent meeting with the government, we called for promoting tourism to solve the dollar crisis," Toab President Shiblul Azam Koreshi said at an event at its office in the capital on Sunday.

"There are a lot of obstacles to attract foreign tourists in Bangladesh, especially the complicated visa process," he said and added that citizens of 61 countries presently can travel to Bangladesh on on-arrival visas.

"We hope that the on-arrival visa service will be expanded further before the introduction of an e-visa service."

Shiblul Azam also called for facilitating the travel of foreign tourists to the Chattogram Hill Tracts with an online system for issuing permits.

Taking part in the event on the further potential of tourism, jointly organised by Toab and the Aviation and Tourism Journalists Forum of Bangladesh, Toab director Md Younus said Bangladeshi missions abroad should run promotional campaigns to attract foreign tourists.

"The Bangladesh Tourism Board shows no visible initiative to make this happen."

Aviation and Tourism Journalists Forum of Bangladesh President Tanzim Anwar, and its General Secretary Ziaul Hoque Sabuj, also spoke at the event.

Compared to neighbouring countries, Bangladesh is yet to become a popular destination for foreign tourists owing to poor tourism and airport infrastructure, complex visa policies, social restrictions, and a lack of comfortable transportation facilities, speakers said.

The country saw around three lakh inbound tourists in 2019, the highest in its history since independence, according to the Bangladesh Tourism Board. The figures were 2.48 lakh in 2018, 2.2 lakh in 2017, 1.69 lakh in 2016 and 1.18 lakh in 2015.  Most were from India.

However, the board does not have inbound tourist data since the Covid-19 pandemic.

"The number of leisure tourists was only 30,000-40,000 per year to the country before the pandemic," Toufiq Rahman, an inbound tour operator and general secretary of the Pacific Asia Travel Association Bangladesh Chapter, told The Business Standard earlier.

In the meantime, Bangladesh's inbound tour operators are expecting a good season this winter as foreign leisure tourists have booked trips after two years of travel restrictions brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Most of these travellers are from Japan, Italy, England, Germany, France, Australia, and some other Asian countries, say travel operators.

On 26 September this year, Bangladesh lifted all types of travel restrictions for foreign tourists imposed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, paving the way for tour operators to book foreign tourists for winter trips.