(This article is part of our special series 'Rethinking Bangladesh'. You can read the editorial note to the series here.)
For years, the Bangladesh Parjatan Corporation, the country's statutory tourism board, ran a campaign with this terse instruction: "Visit Bangladesh Before Tourists Come". Its brightly-coloured posters with scenic landscapes and grand monuments showed what the tourists were missing, yet failed to convey what makes Bangladesh interesting to outsiders – what could attract the desired tourist dollar. The wags said it should read: "Visit Bangladesh Because the Tourists Never Came", and at some point the campaign was quietly dropped.
Its recent replacement might speak more invitingly of "Discovering Bangladesh", but still sells the country as a destination for the iconoclastic traveller, rather than appealing to the mass-tourism market. This niche marketing may have been partly successful before the COVID-19 pandemic: visitor numbers have doubled since 1995, and in 2019, the World Economic Forum listed Bangladesh as the world's 'most improved' location for tourism. Yet Bangladesh still had remarkably few international arrivals. War-torn Syria saw seven times as many visitors as Bangladesh in 2019, while three times more went to Haiti than to Bangladesh. Domestic tourism is a growth sector, a fact that Parjatan Corporation recognises with its predominantly Bangla social-media posts. But outsiders, by and large, have resisted its charms in favour of almost anywhere else in the world.
Without a tedious catalogue of Bangladesh's natural beauties, and historical and cultural fascinations, and even accepting that it lacks the hotels and bars that international tourists desire, it is safe to say there is plenty to see and enjoy in the country, as there is anywhere you take the trouble to look. Many visitors, including veteran travellers, continue to be pleasantly surprised by a place that is on nobody's bucket list – even by the scenic beauty and grand monuments of the Parjatan posters.