Deepak Raj Joshi

Former CEO, NTB

I am delighted and honored to welcome distinguished delegates, guests, prominent media persons, travel entrepreneurs and venerable monks in the First Buddhist International Travel Mart in Lumbini- birthplace of Lord Buddha from January 10-12, 2019. The core objective of Buddhist International Travel Mart is to promote Lumbini as the prime Buddhist heritage and pilgrimage site providing a platform for international travel and tourism entrepreneurs to exchange creative ideas about their business, to discuss about the changing pattern of doing business and to promote their business in a conducive environment. In this context, I would like to assert that Lumbini is the starting point of Buddhist circuit and expect that everyone follows it when doing Buddhist pilgrimage. It is a top spiritual destination offering life time experiences full of spiritualism and a higher world beyond material realization. The idea behind BITM is also to showcase the hidden treasures of Nepal that have not been fully exposed to international tourism and travel industry. Apart from this, Nepal’s brand as a country of Himalaya offers diversified life time experiences in terms of adventure, culture, religion, nature, language and so on. I wish grand success of the program and hope that our distinguished guests will have very memorable stay in Nepal. Let peace prevail upon everyone. .