Kathmandu airport chaos: a case study in how to deter visitors

Plane Talk: Nepal’s capital is hard to leave – and not in a good way

Flight path to enlightenment: Buddha Air plane at Kathmandu airport (Simon Calder )

In the days of the Hippie Trail, Kathmandu was six weeks away from the UK by Magic Bus – a fun and fume-filled vehicle calling at Istanbul, Tehran and Kabul. The happy hippies discovered an indulgent and intriguing city, the welcoming Nepali people and the prospect of trekking in the world’s highest mountain range.

These days the overland journey through Iran and Afghanistan is a tougher proposition. Instead, most travellers fly in. The nation needs all the tourists it can get right now, to rebuild after devastating floods earlier in the year. Yet at the height of the trekking season, Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority is making life extremely difficult for people to get in – and out.

The nation’s main airport, Kathmandu (KTM), has just started to close each night from 10pm to 8am until the end of March 2025. The aim is to improve the layout of taxiways and add much-needed capacity.

During the remaining 14 hours of each day when the airport is open, operations are currently a shambles due to air-traffic control hold-ups. Planes typically wait an hour or more to get in and out of the one-runway airport. My Thai Lion Air departure on Tuesday afternoon from Kathmandu to Bangkok took off an unfortunate 100 minutes behind schedule.

The necessary work to make the airport capable of meeting the demand for travel in and around Nepal must be carried out during the current dry season, which is also the peak time for trekking. But the announcement of nightly closures was made absurdly late.

Airlines start selling tickets around 11 months before departure. So the appropriate notice of such a restriction is one year. Instead, the airlines were given just a few weeks’ warning. The predictable result: even more chaos than in the average peak season.

I calculate there would normally be around 40 flights in and out of Kathmandu overnight. Carriers have rescheduled as best they can, but capacity is down about 30 per cent. Two of the key carriers to and from the Nepali capital, Air India and Qatar Airways, have made substantial cancellations. I was booked on the Qatari airline, and am one of thousands of people whose flights were cancelled.

While I am lucky enough to spend much of my time on holiday pretending to work, I do have commitments in the UK this week. So I set about finding an alternative. The bottleneck was leaving Kathmandu; I vowed to take any flight on any airline heading for the Gulf and sort out the rest of the journey from there.

But all flights to Abu Dhabi, Doha and Dubai were full in the near future. Even Sharjah – a handy alternative to Dubai – had no availability. Finally, I found one remaining seat on Thai Lion Air to Bangkok – priced at $1,000 (£780).

A glance at the map will show that this involves flying for three hours in exactly the wrong direction. But British Airways had a decent flight from Bangkok to Gatwick for a reasonable £525, so I paid the eye-watering fare. And then my problems really began.

There was a four-hour gap between my scheduled arrival in the Thai capital and the BA departure. But the first flight arrived 100 minutes late at the old airport, Don Mueang, north of the city; the second departed from the newer hub southeast of Bangkok.

On a good day, a taxi will take an hour. I was all set up to fail, until a taxi driver sped to the new airport in 40 minutes flat. I even had time for a beer before the flight. Yet I am saddened that Nepal has provided a case study on how to deter visitors with a botched aviation infrastructure project. The past few stressful hours have erased happy memories of great experiences and the natural longing to return.

If I ever go back to Kathmandu, perhaps I should take the bus.