High on my travel bucket list is a visit to the Kingdom of Bhutan. The country has now reopened, but a new fee assures that all but the most wealthy will be deterred from visiting.
Bhutan Reopens With A New Daily Fee
After a prolonged border closure due to the pandemic, Bhutan is open again, now welcoming international tourists with a new twist on its sustainability fee.
Prior to the pandemic, it cost you $250 per day to visit Bhutan, but that $250 went toward the cost of your food, lodging, and transport. The new fee is $200 per person per day…but it’s simply a daily fee that will be collected and not applied toward the cost of your trip.
Bhutan fully intends to deter visitors with its high cost, full stop.
Dorji Dhradhul, the Director-General of the Tourism Council of Bhutan, told TIME:
“Tourism, as an industry, was becoming less professional and was becoming low-hanging fruit. Locals saw it as a very easy way to make money. We were basically, as a sector, racing towards the bottom instead of aspiring to go higher up.”
As a plus, the new fee ushers in a new policy: guided tours are no longer required. As much as I appreciate having a knowledgeable guide, I look forward to exploring Bhutan on my own.
Furthermore, the fee will underwrite improving infrastructure and planting trees. That’s not a bad approach to balancing tourism with a desire to protect the beauty that attracts tourists in the first place.
CONCLUSION
Bhutan hopes the new fee will ensure it remains an “exclusive destination” attracting “discerning tourists.”
I think we’ve all seen that money does not necessarily translate to class, but the high daily fee will certainly make Bhutan a more exclusive destination.
Bhutan reopens – will you be traveling there?
That is exactly how it should be. Too many people, cause too much impact.
And until we start our castration program, anyone with more than 2 kids gets castrated on prime TV, and there are quite a few celebrities that can be castrated first, we really have no right to complain about the exclusivity. Personally. I think Bhutan has it exactly right. This way it does not depend exclusively on Tourism but still gets a good amount of money from low impact tourism.
Next we should tie up goverment aid inside and outside our country to castration goals.
Talk about castration, you ought to look in the mirror. Enough said!
Bhutan has also raised the SDF charged to Indian, Bangladeshi and Maldivian tourists by 500% from what was $3/day to what is now around $15/day.
I know other tourist destinations are struggling with the negative effects of tourism, especially on their natural resources and infrastructure, but efforts to implement a specific tourist fee consistently meet with opposition from the industry.
Matthew, do you know of other destinations that have done something similar to Bhutan?
I was in Bhutan 4 years ago. The lack of tourists and beautiful nature made it one of my top 5 countries in the world. Well worth visiting even with the new fee.
I agree with Lukas. Bhutan is such a special place and is one of my top three countries in the world. I am all for this. I ended up paying for my hotels in Paro and Thimphu anyways because I wanted to stay at Le Meridien…I used cash & points…so it wasn’t too bad. Both hotels are worth the money though! If you go, be sure to eat at ZaSa in Thimphu. Such an amazing experience!
A $200/day fee makes sure that if I ever visit Bhutan, it will be a very quick trip, like one or two days. I will not spend 1 week there and pay a $1400 fee. That will kill tourism to other than around Paro airport and the capital city of Thimphu.
Went a few years. Booked with the Amankora. Which had the benefit of travel to it’s various lodges, dotted around the country. We stayed at Paro, Thimphu and the glacial valley lodge in Gangtey. (There were a few other lodges we didn’t manage to go to). Fanatistic trip; but once is enough!
This has devastated the careers of several friends and is taking money away from their local craftsman and business owners that were expecting a return to normal tourism after such long closures due to the pandemic. It’s a very unpopular move among the Bhutanese people themselves. It also doesn’t solve the tourism problems presented with large amounts of South Asian tourists flooding into the country (which at $15/day is still cheap) which are generally seen as being what is problematic in tourism currently. I’m not sure what Bhutan is thinking with this move but we’ll see what happens. I do think the move to allow people to travel more freely is a nice change. I have wanted to go for years but the whole tour guide thing has prevented me since it was difficult for me to go visit friends that live off the beaten path because the price was so prohibitive to tour lesser visited areas of the country (plus being able to homestay with friends was out of the question before). I just hope Bhutan doesn’t forget it’s own citizenry in this move (and the fees always included a portion that went to funding government programs like public schools and universal healthcare in Bhutan so that hasn’t changed much).
What are you talking about $15 daily?? It’s $250
For Indian citizens and others in the region, it is much less.
It’s to keep away the Instagram and YouTube idiots that have ruined tourism all around the world. The rest of us are just collateral damage.
It sucks but can’t say that I blame them. Wish my own home town had the balls to tell the so-called “influencers” and “digital nomads” to go fuck off.
This post isn’t totally correct. Bhutan has actually been open to tourists since April, though many tour companies remained closed. I went in July for four days and was required to test upon landing and then quarantine for 24 hours. I met a few other American tourists, but the numbers were low. The fee had already been raised by that point, and the guides were not happy at all. The government is also considering raising the fee to $400 per day per person, which would all but decimate the tourist industry ( which is the second biggest industry in the country after hydroelectric power). To me this seems like a shortsighted move. The country is already hurting – multiple people in the tourist industry expressed a desire to move to the US or Australia – and this will not help at all.
I spent a week there in 2016 on a “ group tour”…there were two of us. Loved it, especially the hike to the Tiger’s Nest. A friend went, and was horrified by the poverty. I imagine this fee will cause even more poverty.
Actually, regarding guides, as per today’s news in Kuensel, “A tour guide is mandatory for all tours except from the entry point up to the first hotel.”
– Keshav (bhutanrebirth.com)
Kind of funny coming from a country that decided to measure its wealth in Gross Domestic Happiness….