Kakshapati Elected New HAN President

By TC Correspondent


The 41st annual general meeting of the Hotel Association of Nepal (HAN) held on February 10 elected Shyamsundar Lal Kakshapati, the Chairman of Nanglo Group, as the new HAN President for the next two years. Kakshapati has been associated with HAN for the past one and a half decades. "I will work for the betterment of the entire hotel industry.

My major focus will be on expanding the industry, which has been by and large confined to Kathmandu, to across the country," Kakshapati told The Corporate after his election as the new HAN President. His Nanglo Group runs a chain of restaurants, pubs and resorts across the country including the Nanglo Baker Café at New Baneshwor, Nanglo Pub at Durbar Marg and the Riverside Resort at Kurintar. Earlier, inaugurating HAN's AGM, Prime Minister Dr Baburam Bhattarai said that the government is planning additional incentives for the hotel industry to promote tourism in the country. "The number of tourists coming to Nepal is on the rise. Now, the hotel industry should focus on increasing the length of the tourists' stay in the country," remarked Dr Bhattrai.

“The investment in tourism infrastructure was Rs 11 billion in 2011. We expect it to be Rs 20 billion by 2021,” said Radhesh Pant, Chief Executive Officer of the Investment Board. He added that the sector is expected to create 1.1 million jobs by that time compared to 300,000 jobs in 2011. The direct contribution of the sector to the country's GDP in 2011 stood at 3.2 per cent. The AGM also elected BK Shrestha of Radisson Hotel as the 1st Vice President, Binod Shanker Shrestha of Hotel Shanker as the 2nd Vice President, Amar Man Shakya of Amar Hotel as the General Secretary and Abhishek Shrestha of Island Jungle Resort as the Treasurer.

The newly elected HAN executive members include Pravin Bahadur Pandey of Hotel Shangri La, Srijana Rana of Hotel Annapurna, Dinesh Bista of Hotel Soaltee, Dinesh Tuladhar of Hotel Himalaya, Sreedhar Acharya of Greenwich Village Hotel, Bishal Kumar of Hotel Vaishali, Rakesh Das Shrestha of Hotel Manaslu, TsetenNorkyel of Hotel Garuda, Ghanendra Bahadur Shrestha of Choice Hotel and Binod Kharel of Red Planet Guesthouse.