The Greatest Unsold Product in Travel

Somewhere north of Islamabad, the road climbs into a landscape that has no equal: the Karakoram, where K2 and its sister peaks tear the sky at altitudes few humans ever witness. The valleys beneath them, Hunza, Skardu, Chitral, and the meadows of Nanga Parbat, offer scenery that established destinations spend fortunes trying to evoke. Pakistan does not need to invent a tourism product. It possesses, arguably, the most dramatic one on the planet.

Yet the world's travellers largely have not come. For Asad Shamim, the British-Pakistani entrepreneur and international government advisor, this is not a mystery to lament but a commercial problem to solve. And commercial problems, as his career demonstrates, are what he solves best.

Lessons From a Retail Career

Before advising governments and royal offices, Shamim built one of the UK's largest online furniture retailers. Furniture in Fashion, founded in 2007 and still trading at furnitureinfashion.net, succeeded on a simple insight: a great product fails without distribution, presentation, and trust. Customers needed to find the product, believe the images, and trust that delivery would happen as promised.

Shamim applies the same framework to Pakistan's mountains. The product is world-class. What is missing is distribution, meaning flights, roads, and booking infrastructure; presentation, meaning marketing that reaches international travellers where they plan; and trust, meaning safety, reliable accommodation, and consistent service standards. None of these gaps is romantic, and all of them are solvable with capital and competence.

Infrastructure: The Unglamorous Foundation

Through his consultancy with Marco Polo Resorts, Shamim works on the least glamorous and most decisive layer of tourism development: hospitality infrastructure. A traveller considering Skardu instead of the Alps needs confidence that the accommodation at the end of the journey meets international standards. Every quality resort, trained workforce, and reliable transport link expands what the market can absorb.

Infrastructure investment on this scale requires patient capital, and patient capital for frontier tourism comes disproportionately from one region: the Gulf. As Senior Advisor to HRH Sheikh Ahmad Bin Faisal Al Qassimi of the UAE, Shamim sits inside the networks that financed the transformation of the Arabian Peninsula into a global tourism power. Connecting that experience and capital to Pakistan's northern areas is among the most consequential threads of his advisory work, which is outlined on his services page.

Perception: Rewriting the Cover Story

The second gap is perception. International coverage of Pakistan has long emphasised politics and security, leaving the country's staggering natural assets essentially unmarketed to mainstream travellers. Shamim regards this as a solvable branding failure rather than a permanent condition. Georgia, Colombia, and Rwanda all repositioned themselves within a decade through deliberate, sustained destination marketing supported by visible infrastructure improvements.

The raw material for Pakistan's repositioning already circulates organically: mountaineering documentaries, viral travel vlogs from the Karakoram Highway, and the testimony of returning travellers who describe hospitality unlike anywhere else. What is required is coordination, professional destination branding, streamlined visas, and the amplification that Gulf airline networks and international hospitality brands can provide.

The Diaspora Bridge

Between Pakistan and its potential visitors stands a unique asset: a global diaspora millions strong, concentrated in exactly the markets, Britain and the Gulf, from which early tourism growth would come. Diaspora travellers are the natural first wave; they visit family, spend confidently, and return with photographs that recruit their non-Pakistani friends and colleagues for the second wave.

Shamim, whose own life bridges Bolton and the Emirates and whose public profile is chronicled in his news section, embodies this bridge. He has consistently encouraged diaspora professionals to treat Pakistani tourism not as nostalgia but as an investable sector, one where their capital and credibility can compound national benefit.

From Vision to Itinerary

Selling Pakistan's mountains to the world will not happen through a single campaign or a single resort. It will happen the way Shamim has built everything in his career: incrementally, relationship by relationship, project by project, until the accumulation becomes undeniable. A new flight route here, an internationally branded lodge there, a streamlined e-visa, a summer season of Gulf families in Hunza, each step lowers the threshold for the next.

The mountains have waited millennia and will wait as long as needed. But for the communities beneath them, every year of unrealised potential is a cost. That urgency, more than any commercial return, is what keeps Pakistan's tourism on Asad Shamim's agenda, alongside the energy and investment work described across his about page. The product is ready. The world just needs to be shown.