Tourism Industry Registration and Licensing: Travel, Trekking and Adventure
Each Nepali tourism activity carries its own licence, and holding one registration does not authorise the work covered by another.
The commonest mistake in Nepali tourism licensing is treating “tourism business” as a single permission. It is nothing of the kind. A company holding a travel agency licence that sends a client on a trek without a trekking agency licence is operating outside its registration. That usually comes to light when a permit application is refused or an insurance claim is questioned.
Who does what
Three institutions are involved, and they are routinely confused with one another.
The Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation makes the rules. Regulations, standards and classification notices are issued at ministry level and published on its rules pages.
The Department of Tourism, under the Ministry, is the licensing counter. It registers and renews tourism businesses, classifies hotels, issues mountaineering permits, licenses guides, registers casinos and supervises casino operators for anti-money-laundering purposes. It works through three sections: mountain and adventure tourism, administration and hotels, and planning and monitoring.
The Nepal Tourism Board, a statutory body under the Nepal Tourism Board Act 2053 (1996), promotes the destination, publishes the statistics and administers the Trekkers’ Information Management System. It does not license businesses.
Industry associations sit alongside the state without being part of it, and are close to compulsory all the same. The Trekking Agencies’ Association of Nepal issues TIMS cards jointly with the Board, and requires current membership plus a valid Department renewal certificate before an agency can do so.
The licence categories
The Tourism Act 2035 (1978) is still the governing statute, amended several times since. Under it, and the subordinate instruments made beneath it, the Department keeps separate registrations for:
| Category | What it authorises | Open to foreign investment |
|---|---|---|
| Travel agency | Selling and arranging travel, tours and sightseeing | No |
| Trekking agency | Organising and operating treks, including permit handling | No |
| Rafting / river operation | Commercial river running under the navigation rules | Not addressed as a separate head in the FITTA Schedule |
| Adventure and recreational sports | Bungee, paragliding, canyoning and similar, each under its own operating standard | Not addressed as a separate head |
| Tourist guide | Guiding at cultural and natural sites | No |
| Trekking guide | Guiding on trekking routes | No |
| Hotel, lodge, restaurant and resort | Tourist-standard accommodation and catering | Yes |
| Casino | Casino and mini-casino operation | Separately licensed; see below |
The right-hand column is where these categories stop being a filing question and become a structural one. Travel agencies, tourist guiding, trekking and mountaineering guiding, and rural tourism including homestay are all closed to foreign investment by the Schedule to the Foreign Investment and Technology Transfer Act 2075 (2019). Accommodation is open. That division is set out in foreign investment in tourism, and it settles who may apply before any question of documents arises.
How licensing works
The Act is short on procedure. The operative document is the Tourism Industry Service Flow Directive 2070, which the Department republished in consolidated form with all amendments in 2082 (2025/26). It sets out, for each category, the documents required, the responsible desk and the service standard. Anyone preparing an application should work from the consolidated directive rather than the Act, and should check the version. The Department publishes both the original 2070 text and the consolidated one on the same page.
Registration has moved substantially online, and the portals are separate rather than unified:
- Hotel registration runs through the Hotel Registration Management System.
- Mountaineering permissions run through a dedicated climbing permission system.
- Casino registration runs through its own system.
- Mountain guide registration and licence printing run through a separate portal again.
There is no single tourism business register. An investor running diligence on a Nepali counterparty has to check each system relevant to the activities that counterparty claims to perform. Ask for the Department renewal certificate rather than the original registration; the renewal is the document that establishes current standing.
Activity standards
For adventure activities the licence is the beginning of the compliance obligation rather than the end. The Department has issued activity-specific operating standards, of which the Adventure Sport Bungee Operating Standard 2078 is the clearest published example. In 2083 it issued a revised checklist of documents to be submitted for the operation of adventure and recreational sports.
Two operators holding the same registration can therefore face materially different obligations, depending on which activities they run. Equipment specification, staff qualification, rescue arrangements and insurance are dealt with in the standard rather than the licence. A due diligence exercise that verifies the registration and stops has verified the wrong thing.
How many are registered
The Ministry’s 2023 statistics record 4,845 registered travel agencies, 3,191 trekking agencies, 5,123 tourist guides and 26,292 trekking guides. Set against roughly 154,000 visitors a year giving trekking or mountaineering as their purpose, that is one registered trekking agency for every 48 trekking visitors, and one registered trekking guide for every six.
Two readings are available, and both are probably true. The registers are cumulative and carry a long tail of dormant entities never struck off. And the guiding numbers reflect a licensing requirement genuinely enforced at trailhead checkposts, so the guide count sits closer to a real population than the agency count does.
For anyone contracting with a Nepali operator, registration is a weak signal of capacity. It says the entity exists on a list. It says nothing about whether the entity currently trades, holds current insurance, or has the staff to run what it has sold.
The order of filings
A tourism licence is the third or fourth step in the file rather than the first. For a Nepali-owned company the order runs: incorporation at the Office of the Company Registrar; permanent account number and tax registration at the Inland Revenue Department; industry registration where the activity requires it; then application to the Department of Tourism for the specific tourism registration. For trekking work, association membership follows if the business needs to issue TIMS cards. Renewal of the Department registration is annual, and it is the document counterparties should ask for.
For a foreign-invested company the sequence starts earlier, with foreign investment approval from the Department of Industry or Investment Board Nepal, and starts at all only if the activity is off the FITTA Schedule. An application for a travel or trekking agency licence by a company with foreign shareholding does not fail at the Department of Tourism. It fails before it gets there.
We state no licence fees, renewal fees or minimum capital here. The Department publishes them in the Tourism Industry Service Flow Directive, and the published file did not return readable text. Figures circulating in secondary summaries of Nepali tourism licensing are often a decade out of date, and we would rather leave the line blank than repeat them.
Casino supervision
Casino operation is licensed and supervised by the Department of Tourism. A Casino Regulation 2082 has replaced the 2070 line of instruments. The Department issued a risk-based inspection guideline in 2082 and a guideline on targeted financial sanctions for casinos in 2083, and it has issued and twice amended a directive to casino operators as reporting institutions under Nepal’s anti-money-laundering regime.
The volume and speed of that instrument-making is the thing to notice. It is a supervisory build-out consistent with Nepal’s position under FATF increased monitoring, and it means casino licensing in 2026 carries compliance obligations well beyond anything the licence itself describes.
The pending bill
The Integrated Tourism Bill 2081 passed the National Assembly on 9 February 2026. It has not completed passage, and the Tourism Act 2035 remains in force. Until that changes, the licence categories above are the categories, and any advice built on the bill’s structure describes a document that is not yet law.
Sources
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पर्यटन ऐन, २०३५ (Tourism Act, 2035)
Government of Nepal, published by the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation · 1978 (2035 BS) — in force as at August 2026, as amended · Tier 1 — Primary legal instrument
Supports: That the Act licenses travel and trekking agencies, hotels and lodges, guides and adventure activities, and that it has been amended several times since 1978.
Accessed 26 August 2026
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Department of Tourism · 2070 BS (2013/14), consolidated text republished 2082 BS · Tier 1 — Primary legal instrument
Supports: That the Department administers tourism industry licensing through a consolidated service-flow directive rather than through the Act alone.
Accessed 26 August 2026
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Department of Tourism, Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation · Listing accessed August 2026; includes Hotel, Lodge and Guide Regulation 2083, Casino Regulation 2082, Mountaineering (Sixth Amendment) Regulation 2081, Mountaineering Regulation 2059 and Hotel Standard 2077 · Tier 2 — Official publication
Supports: The set of subordinate instruments currently published by the Department and their stated years.
Accessed 26 August 2026
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Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation (published via Nepal Tourism Board) · 2024, covering calendar 2023 · Tier 2 — Official publication
Supports: Counts of registered travel agencies (4,845), trekking agencies (3,191), tourist guides (5,123) and trekking guides (26,292) at Table 9.2, and hotel counts at Table 9.1.
Accessed 26 August 2026
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साहसिक खेल बन्जी सञ्चालन मापदण्ड, २०७८ (Adventure Sport Bungee Operating Standard, 2078)
Department of Tourism · 2078 BS (2021/22) · Tier 1 — Primary legal instrument
Supports: That individual adventure activities are governed by activity-specific operating standards issued by the Department rather than by the licence alone.
Accessed 26 August 2026
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Trekking Agencies' Association of Nepal · Accessed August 2026; describes the system in force since 1 April 2023 · Tier 6 — Professional or news source
Supports: That TIMS is administered by the Nepal Tourism Board with TAAN, that it moved online at tims.ntb.gov.np on 1 April 2023, and the documents an agency must hold to issue cards.
Accessed 26 August 2026
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