Kathmandu, March 24 -- The average length of stay of foreign tourists in Nepal is 12 days, but most travellers visiting Lumbini, one of the world's most iconic Buddhist pilgrimage sites, spend barely 30 minutes at the holy site.

A 2016 survey titled Visitors Survey and Observation found that 72.6 percent of visitors spent only half an hour sightseeing in Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha in southern Nepal, which is being developed as an international pilgrimage destination.

Efforts to increase both visitor numbers and duration of stay have repeatedly fallen short. The government's Visit Lumbini Year campaign in 2012 failed to produce the desired results.

Hopes were revived on May 16, 2022, when Nepal inaugurated its second internat...