Kathmandu, Jan. 3 -- Visit Nepal 3.0 hoped to host 2 million tourists in 2020 but it ended up becoming the worst year for tourism since 1986.

The Covid-19 pandemic crisis resulted in 80.78 percent drop in tourist arrivals of the previous year making it the worst year-on-year drop in terms of arrivals number since Nepal opened for the outside world in the 1950s.

In 1955 world-renowned Thomas Cook and Sons brought a group of 60 tourists to Nepal, who were officially recognized as foreign tourists. Nepal started keeping records of foreign tourists since 1962.

According to the statistics of the Department of Immigration, only 230,085 foreign tourists visited Nepal last year, a figure similar to that of 1986.

And most of them came before t...