Tourism on the decline

Pakistan lies 14th on the list of Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index, unfortunately, from the bottom. To make it sound even worse, Pakistan betters only two countries in the Asia pacific region on tourism competiveness, so reads the latest report on Travel & Tourism Competitiveness published by the World Economic Forum.
And rather unsurprisingly, just like on various other international rankings, Pakistan has slipped by 12 places in the latest assessment in just two years time. Contrary to the popular perception, Pakistans tourism industry has never been a booming one even in the pre-war on terror days.
What is worrying is that the decline in the number of travellers and the tourism receipts has come at a time when the industry is on a boom throughout the world in general and in Asia in specific reaching all time highs. Why Pakistan is on a decline one may ask - and the most obvious answer would be the security situation and the ongoing war in the northern areas. The report ranks Pakistan 2nd in the countries having the higher cost of terrorism to tourism.
Security situation, no doubt has a big say in tourism activities but that alone is not the reason as evident by the graph which shows that the tourism activity picked up in Pakistan after the war on terror, peaking in 2006, when the security situation was anything but normal.
The answer lies in the lack of efforts made by both the government and the private sector to attract tourists and identify potential venues and market them in an effective manner. The bad security situation is not a very old phenomenon for Pakistan, but tourism for the most part in 90s received little to no attention as there were no efforts made to work on infrastructure and tourism policies to attract travellers.
The same old issues of hygiene, health, environment, corruption perception among others are more responsible for the low rank than the law & order alone. No wonder, Pakistans rank is 134 out of 139 countries, when it comes to businessman extending their trip for leisure purposes, as the incentives are not enticing enough to take that big a risk.
One may argue that the worsening law and order situation is an external factor and largely uncontrollable, but there are other areas which are entirely controllable and await government will and direction, which is nowhere to be seen.
Pakistan is blessed with a rich cultural heritage and ranks a respectable 29 in the world having 8 cultural heritages of global recognition. What lacks is the image building, the story-telling and the marketing efforts around most of the heritages which results in them being unnoticed and their health deteriorating every passing day - hence, no takers.
Moreover, Pakistan also has the selling feature of low hotel pricing index and purchasing power parity where it is ranked 11th and 8th respectively. The air transport infrastructure too does well on various indicators but lacks direct flights to tourism destinations - making it a difficult route for the tourist as the road transport infrastructure is still far behind the global benchmarks.
There have been some steps taken by the Gilgit Baltistan government to promote tourism as the area is regarded relatively safer than a few of KP tourist destinations. The government needs to realise the importance of tourism as an industry which can not only help generate revenue, but will also help in image building exercise much more directly at low costs. Just losing hope on the security situation will only make matters worse.