How to Protect a Hotel or Travel Brand in Nepal

Protect a hotel or travel brand in Nepal by registering the name and logo as trade marks at the Department of Industry, once for each class the business touches. The room, the ride and the guided walk are three different classes, and one application will not reach all three.

Key takeaways

• A Nepali application covers one class, so most tourism brands need more than one.
• Rooms and meals sit in Class 43; transport and travel arrangement in Class 39.
• Conducting a guided tour is Class 41, and Class 39 excludes it by name.
• Managing someone else's hotel is a Class 35 business service, not a Class 43 one.
• Nepal is first-to-file, so the queue beats who welcomed guests first.
• The ® symbol has no Nepali legal effect, and claiming registration early is prohibited.
• Nepal is outside the Madrid System, so every source market needs its own filing.

Why is a tourism brand a classification problem?

Because one name does several unrelated jobs. It sits above a reception desk, on a minibus and inside a booking confirmation, and the classification treats those as separate businesses.

A packaged-goods brand can live in one class for years. A hotel that starts running its own treks has crossed a boundary the register does not cross with it.

What does Class 43 actually cover?

The official heading is short: services for providing food and drink; temporary accommodation. That is the room and the meal, and little else.

The explanatory note adds hotel reservations, renting meeting rooms and tents, and personal chef services. It is generous about anything happening on your premises, but it is not a tourism class: nothing about a trek, a transfer or a booking platform follows from it.

Which class covers a tour or transfer business?

Class 39 is transport, packaging and storage of goods, and travel arrangement. Its list names escorting travellers, transport for sightseeing tours, and arranging travel visas and documents, so a tour operator's paperwork desk sits inside it.

Is guiding the trek the same class as arranging it?

No, and this is the split most adventure brands get wrong. Class 39's official exclusion list says plainly that conducting guided tours belongs in Class 41.

Class 41 confirms it from the other side, with entries for conducting guided tours and guided climbing tours. Arranging the trip is 39; walking in front of the group is 41.

A trekking company that files only Class 39 has left the part customers actually remember unprotected.

Does a lodge on a trek change the answer?

Usually not. Class 43 excludes educational and entertainment services even where they involve ancillary lodging or food, naming sport camps as an example.

So a multi-day adventure programme reads as Class 41. A lodge selling beds to whoever walks in reads as Class 43.

Where does hotel management sit?

In Class 35. The classification lists business management of hotels there, and Class 43 excludes it by name.

So for an operator running properties it does not own, the management brand and the property brand can be two marks in two classes. Our note on registering a brand in Nepal covers the general sequence.

Who owns the booking?

It depends what is booked. Reservation of hotel rooms by travel agents is excluded from Class 39 and sits in Class 43, while booking seats for travel sits in Class 39.

An online agency doing both is, on the classification's own logic, working in two classes at once.

What does the register look like in a tourism district?

Thin, where you would least expect it. Filtering our published-mark data to a Kaski or Pokhara address gives a thousand entries, only eighty-three in Class 43.

Class 41 has eight and Class 39 has seven. Class 30 has four hundred and sixty.

Nepal's best-known tourism district has a register dominated by packaged food, and most hospitality names there are unfiled. Check a rival's position with our owner and applicant search.

Why does filing order matter in Nepal?

Because title comes from the register. Under Sec. 16(1) of the Patent, Design and Trade Mark Act 1965 a person acquires title to the trade mark of their business upon registration at the Department, and the Act offers no route through use alone.

Years of guest reviews and a known signboard are useful evidence in a fight. Neither is a registration.

How do you search before you file?

Search the words first, then everything that sounds like them. Our Nepal trade mark search covers marks published in the Industrial Property Bulletin, where place names repeat constantly.

Published-mark searching is screening, not clearance. It will not show applications that have not yet reached the bulletin, so treat a clean result as encouraging rather than final. Our trade mark search service takes it further.

Browsing what is already published in a class also shows how crowded your corner is.

How do you choose the classes?

List what the business is paid for, line by line, then match each line rather than the industry.

Our NICE class finder and the AI classifier work from plain wording, and the goods and services search shows how others phrase it.

What does the filing itself involve?

1. Settle the owner. The company or person who will hold the brand, named exactly as in the records.
2. Search. Check the name and the logo in each class you intend to file in.
3. Write the services. Specific wording per class, matching what you sell now.
4. File one application per class. Section 18A(2) requires a separate application for goods or services in different categories.
5. Answer the examiner. Objections on similarity or distinctiveness need evidence, not indignation.
6. Follow publication. The bulletin starts the objection period, after which a registration certificate can issue.

Our trademark registration service runs the preparation and the follow-up across the classes together.

What documents does the Department want?

Section 17(1) sets the core: the prescribed application form with four specimens of the mark. In practice a Nepali applicant also brings a board authority, a power of attorney where an agent signs, the industry or business registration documents where needed, and a tax clearance. A newly formed company will not have a tax clearance yet, so confirm the Department's current checklist.

A foreign applicant files through a representative here and adds certified home papers. Confirm the current list with the Department of Industry; the paperwork changes more often than the law does.

How long does it take?

Plan in years, not months. Our own published-mark data suggests the gap from filing to bulletin publication is often fifteen to eighteen months, and some marks take far longer.

Publication then opens the objection period, and a contested application takes longer still. Do not build an opening date around a promised certificate.

How long is the objection period?

A published trade mark can be opposed within ninety days of its publication in the Industrial Property Bulletin, so act early.

Rely on the deadline the Department of Industry states, act before the last day and treat any objection as urgent. Our opposition and enforcement service handles the filing.

Can you use the TM or R symbol on your signage?

The symbols carry no legal effect in Nepal. The Act never uses them.

The opposite claim does. Sec. 18B forbids using a trade mark as a registered trade mark without registering it, and Sec. 19 backs that with a fine and confiscation of the goods involved.

So the rule is simple: no registration symbol until the registration exists for those services.

What about the domain and the platform listings?

Take them the day the name is settled. A registration is the strongest lever when you ask a platform to remove an imitator, because it is proof rather than assertion. Our guide to locking down the domain and handles covers the order.

Does copyright cover your itineraries and photographs?

Original itineraries, brochure copy and trail photography carry copyright under the Copyright Act 2059 (2002) from creation, with no filing required.

The risk is ownership, not existence. Paying a photographer does not transfer copyright by itself, so put a written assignment into every engagement. IP Sewa does not file copyright; that route runs through the Copyright Registrar's Office.

Can you protect a signature building or fitting?

A genuinely new shape or ornament can be registered as an industrial design, so a distinctive lamp or a carved panel may be a candidate. The printed brand on it stays a trade mark question.

Nepal has no single right covering a whole interior. Our industrial design service prepares the representations, and our note on product design explains what qualifies.

How do you protect a brand that sells abroad?

One country at a time. Nepal is outside the Madrid System, so no single application reaches India, Europe or the United States from Kathmandu.

Nepal has been a Paris Convention party since 2001, letting a later foreign filing claim the date of your Nepali one within the allowed window. See IP for export-facing businesses, and the World Intellectual Property Organization for the current treaty lists.

Common mistakes

• Filing Class 43 and assuming the trekking arm is covered.
• Filing Class 39 for a business whose product is the guided walk.
• Waiting for reviews and rankings, in a first-to-file country.
• Treating company registration at the Company Registrar as brand protection.
• Putting a registration symbol on a signboard before the registration exists.
• Filing the logo, redesigning it two seasons later, and never refiling.

A worked example

Annapurna Doorway runs a twelve-room lodge in Pokhara, drives guests from the airport and leads a four-day ridge walk. This is an illustration, not a real case, but a realistic sequence.

It files the word mark in Class 43 first, because the beds pay the bills. Class 41 follows when the ridge walk becomes a named product, and Class 39 once transfers are sold separately.

It signs an assignment with its photographer and keeps the application numbers beside the renewal dates.

What should you do in the first month?

Five things, none needing a lawyer. Doing them early beats doing them perfectly.

A class map for a tourism business

Use this to turn a revenue list into a filing list. The right-hand test is the one an examiner is effectively applying.

What happens after registration?

A registration runs seven years from the date of registration under Sec. 18D. Under Sec. 23B a trade mark may be renewed any number of times for seven years at a time, so the renewal term never runs out provided the dates are kept.

There is also a use requirement: under Sec. 18C a mark not brought into use within one year of registration can be cancelled after enquiry, which matters for a class filed ahead of opening.

Three classes means three dates. Our renewal calculator works them out and our renewal service keeps them.

In short

Count the activities, file the classes that carry revenue, and add the rest as the business grows. Keep the assignments, dates and certificates in one place.

The classification is more literal than the industry is. The room, the ride and the walk are three businesses on paper. The Nepal Law Commission carries the Act if you want the wording.

If the brand already trades under a name you have not filed, fix that this month rather than next season.

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If you are weighing one class now against three later, that is a conversation worth having before the signboard is painted. Contact our team and we will map the revenue lines to the filings with you.