Tourism in Bangladesh runs on Bangladeshis: about 15 million domestic travellers a year against fewer than 600,000 foreign visitors — and the foreign figure has fallen three years running. This is the industry in 2026: its arrivals and earnings, its idle new airports and reformed visa rules, and the closures, from Sajek to Saint Martin, that expose its fragility.
Bangladesh should be an easy country to sell. It holds the largest mangrove forest on earth, a sandy beach that runs for some 120 kilometres, the tea gardens of Sylhet, hill country in the south-east and three UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Yet fewer than 600,000 foreign visitors arrived in 2025 — the third annual fall in a row — and the industry is, in truth, a domestic one. Some 15 million Bangladeshis travel inside their own country each year, filling the hotels of Cox's Bazar and the cottages of Sajek, while the foreign market remains one of the smallest in South Asia. As part of the wider story of business in Bangladesh, tourism is the chapter where the gap between what the country has and what it earns is widest — and where, in 2026, the government has begun to try to close it.
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The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) estimated that travel and tourism contributed US$14.3 billion to Bangladesh's economy in 2025, equal to 2.9 percent of GDP, and generated about 2.8 million jobs. The Ministry of Civil Aviation and Tourism puts the sector's current share at 2 to 3 percent of GDP — modest for a country of 170 million people.
The foreign figures are moving the wrong way. According to Bangladesh Tourism Board statistics prepared by the Special Branch of Police, Bangladesh received 655,451 foreign visitors in 2023, 633,094 in 2024 and 585,145 in 2025 — a fall of 7.6 percent in the last year. In the first half of 2026, arrivals fell again, by around 20 percent year on year, to 239,400 (Special Branch and Bangladesh Bank data compiled by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics). Even these numbers flatter the leisure market: officials and operators alike caution that the count includes business travellers, conference visitors and the many Bangladeshi-origin foreign passport holders who come to visit family, rather than holidaymakers.
The composition is shifting, too. India has long been the largest source market, but Indian arrivals fell by 26.1 percent in 2025 to 194,609, as tensions between Dhaka and Delhi led both sides to cut visa issuance sharply; India's share of arrivals dropped from 45 percent in 2023 to 33.3 percent in 2025. The United Kingdom was the second-largest market, with 113,288 visitors in 2025, up 4.9 percent, and arrivals from several Western and East Asian markets grew. Earnings tell the same story of a small market: the Asian Development Bank put Bangladesh's earnings from foreign tourists at US$453 million in 2023 and US$440 million in 2024. In the World Economic Forum's Travel and Tourism Development Index, as reported in 2026, Bangladesh ranked 98th of 110 countries — and last in South Asia for foreign arrivals.
The product itself is not the problem. On the coast, Cox's Bazar offers one of the longest unbroken sandy beaches in the world, running some 120 kilometres along the Bay of Bengal, while Kuakata, far to the west, is one of the rare beaches where both sunrise and sunset are visible over the sea. Saint Martin's Island, known as the country's only coral island, is small enough to walk around and rationed like a nature reserve. In the south-west, the Sundarbans — the world's largest mangrove forest, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997 — shelters the Bengal tiger: the October 2024 census counted 125 tigers. The north-east adds a different landscape: the tea estates and wetlands of greater Sylhet, the haor basins that turn into inland seas each monsoon, and lakes such as Tanguar Haor, rich in wintering birds.
The heritage offer is just as deep, and just as little known abroad. Bangladesh has three UNESCO World Heritage Sites: the Sundarbans; the Historic Mosque City of Bagerhat, the fifteenth-century city of Khan Jahan Ali with its Sixty Dome Mosque; and the Ruins of the Buddhist Vihara at Paharpur, the great Somapura Mahavihara monastery, the latter two inscribed in 1985. Around them stand the Mughal and Sultanate mosques of Old Dhaka, terracotta temples, colonial-era zamindar houses, and living crafts such as Jamdani weaving. The Tourism Master Plan has catalogued 1,498 tourism resources across the country. The shortage has never been of things to see.
In the south-east, the Chittagong Hill Tracts supply the country's mountain scenery: the cloud-covered ridge of Sajek in Rangamati, the hills and waterfalls of Bandarban, and Kaptai Lake. It is the region foreign visitors often picture — and, as the Sajek case below shows, the one where access is least guaranteed. Foreign nationals need a district-administration permit to visit — a reminder that this is a security-managed border region as well as a holiday destination.
If foreign tourism is the industry's weakness, domestic tourism is its engine. There is no official count of domestic tourists — a former chief executive of the Tourism Board wrote in September 2026 that accurate statistics "cannot be found anywhere" — but media and master-plan reporting commonly put it at roughly one and a half crore — about 15 million travellers a year — and industry estimates hold that around 90 percent of the sector now relies on domestic tourists. The WTTC estimated domestic visitor spending at BDT 910.7 billion in 2024 — the financial backbone of the industry.
The boom is visible wherever Bangladeshis gather. During the long Eid holidays, hundreds of thousands of people leave the cities; hotels in Cox's Bazar — which operators estimate can sleep at least 100,000 tourists a night — fill to capacity, and trains and flights sell out days ahead. A growing urban middle class, better highways such as the Padma Bridge corridor to the south-west, and a decade of resort building have turned the short domestic break into a mass habit. It is this market — families from Dhaka in Cox's Bazar, young travellers chasing clouds in Sajek — that keeps the industry's hotels, restaurants, boat operators and guides in business.
For years, the industry's binding constraint has been getting in and getting around. Dhaka's Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport handled 13.86 million passengers in 2025 against a stated annual capacity of around 8 million, and in the first half of 2026 it still carried about 83 percent of all air traffic in the country (CAAB data). The relief was supposed to be the airport's Third Terminal, a building of more than Tk 21,000 crore financed largely by Japan. As of November 2026 it stands about 99 percent complete but has never entered service: ceremonially inaugurated in October 2023, it has sat unused for some 22 months while the contract for its operation was negotiated. Movement came on 10 November 2026, when the civil aviation authority's board approved a draft agreement for a Japanese consortium to run the terminal; the government targets a partial opening on 16 December 2026, with full operation expected by March or April 2027.
Cox's Bazar tells a similar story in miniature. Its airport was declared international in October 2025 — and the gazette was suspended eleven days later, after no airline came forward to fly overseas routes. The infrastructure, though, is now real: a runway extended to 10,700 feet, the longest in Bangladesh, built partly into the Maheshkhali Channel, and a new shell-roofed terminal through which trial domestic operations began on 28 September 2026. The aviation authority proposed inaugurating international operations in November 2026 with a Biman flight to Muscat routed through Cox's Bazar; as of mid-November the inauguration was still awaiting the prime minister's schedule, no scheduled international flight had operated, and no foreign airline had committed to the route.
Entry rules have at least begun to modernise. The Visa Policy 2026, approved by the Cabinet in August 2026 and in force from 3 September, replaced the 2006 policy and expanded visa categories from 33 to 34. Since August 2026, travellers can also apply online in advance for a visa on arrival, rather than queueing at a Dhaka airport counter. But Bangladesh still has no full e-visa system — one is planned, without a launch date — and the rules remain capable of moving suddenly: in January 2026 the government announced a month-long suspension of visa on arrival around the national election, then reversed itself within days. Small easements help at the margins: in October 2026 Bangladesh Bank allowed hotels, resorts and restaurants to retain up to 15 percent of the foreign currency that foreign visitors pay them by international card.
Ask operators what most damages Bangladeshi tourism and few begin with marketing. They begin with the closures. The country's best-known destinations sit in places where tourism can be switched off by unrest, weather or regulation — and in recent years it repeatedly has been. After violence in Khagrachhari and Rangamati in September 2024, tourism across the three hill districts was paused for more than a month. In July 2026, heavy rain and landslide risk closed Sajek for about nine days. Abroad, perception lingers: it was only on 31 July 2026 that the United States lowered its travel advisory for Bangladesh from Level 3, "Reconsider Travel", to Level 2, "Exercise Increased Caution".
Regulation can be as restrictive as unrest. Saint Martin's Island opens to tourists only for a short, tightly managed season. For 2026–27 the season runs from 1 November 2026 to 15 March 2027; under a revised environment-ministry notice of 27 October 2026, overnight stays are allowed throughout the season, visitor numbers are capped at an average of 3,500 a day, and every visitor pays a Tk 100 environment fee and must register online. Tourist ships sail only from the Nuniyarchhara jetty in Cox's Bazar — none from Teknaf — and even then the season opened late in practice: no ship sailed for the season's first four days while approvals were pending, and the three approved vessels, the Baro Awlia, Karnafuly Express and MV Teknaf, began sailing on 5 November. The rules protect a fragile island; they also show how much of the industry operates by permission rather than by right.
No case makes the fragility clearer than Sajek Valley in the autumn of 2026. Sajek's ridge-top villages had become one of the country's most popular domestic destinations, their cottages booked out through the winter. On 11 October 2026, two local organisations — the Sajek Public Rights Protection Committee and the Sajek Karbari Association, backed by the UPDF — began an indefinite blockade of the Sajek road over a set of demands, and the Rangamati district administration banned tourist visits the same day. The ban was lifted after four days, and more than 800 tourists entered Sajek on 16 October for Durga Puja. Then, on 22 October, the blockade resumed and the administration closed the destination again, this time until further notice; about 2,933 stranded tourists were evacuated under security escort, and gunfire was reported near Sajek on 31 October. A one-day relaxation on 1 November let residents collect food — Dhaka Tribune reported shortages in the cut-off valley — but normal traffic did not resume, and the upazila administration confirmed the closure would continue until further notice.
The endgame, as of 13 November 2026, is instructive. On 10 November the Karbari Association's president announced that the association had dissolved its committee and withdrawn the indefinite blockade. The next day, the Sajek Resort Owners Association and the jeep owners' association issued a press release announcing that the tourist centre would reopen, with bookings taken from 13 November 2026 — describing the reopening as approved by the district administration. The administration itself had not confirmed it: the Rangamati Deputy Commissioner had said on 6 November that no final decision had been taken, and on 12 November an assistant commissioner told Prothom Alo that no decision had been made and that any decision would come through a formal public notice. At the very start of the peak winter season, Sajek's hotels were selling rooms to a destination that officially remained closed — announced open by its businesses, not yet reopened by the state. The valley's owners and workers have already lost the opening weeks of their best season, for the third autumn running.
The state's machinery for tourism is split between the Bangladesh Tourism Board, established in 2010, and the older Bangladesh Parjatan Corporation, which runs state hotels and tours — both under the Ministry of Civil Aviation and Tourism, an arrangement industry figures criticise, some calling for a standalone tourism ministry. The Tourism Master Plan sets the long view: 5.57 million foreign tourists a year by 2041, backed by about US$1.08 billion of public and private investment across ten tourism clusters. An updated master plan has been in preparation through 2026, with completion expected by December, and a tourism satellite account is being built to measure a sector that cannot yet properly count itself. The Parjatan Corporation has separately proposed 60 development projects worth around Tk 190 billion.
The ambition has recently been given a number. In September 2026 the civil aviation and tourism secretary, Fahmida Akhtar, announced a goal of raising tourism's share of GDP from 2 to 3 percent to 7 percent — more than a doubling, though no deadline was attached. The Tourism Board's chief executive, Mutasim Billah Faruqui, has said promotion will lean on foreign diplomats, bloggers, influencers and journalists; the industry gathered in Dhaka for the Bangladesh Travel and Tourism Fair at the end of October 2026, and a three-month tourism carnival was planned for Cox's Bazar from November. What promotion cannot fix is the list that precedes it: an idle third terminal, an international airport without international flights, a visa system mid-reform, and headline destinations that close without warning.
As of November 2026, Bangladesh's tourism industry is best described as a large domestic business with a small, shrinking foreign one attached. The assets are genuine and, in the Sundarbans and Bagerhat, world-class. The demand at home is proven — 15 million travellers a year do not need to be persuaded, only served. What the industry lacks is the connective tissue that turns assets into an export sector: airports that open on schedule, visas that can be had online, statistics that can be trusted, and above all destinations that stay open. The next twelve months offer an unusually concrete test. If the Third Terminal really does open in December 2026, if Cox's Bazar's first international flight actually leaves the ground, and if Sajek's winter season survives without another blockade, the sector will end 2027 on a different footing. If they slip again, the 7 percent target will remain what it is today — a number announced at a press conference, in an industry still waiting for its infrastructure to catch up with its scenery.
