Azernews.Az

By Nigar Orujova

Azerbaijan continues creating favorable conditions in order to attract more tourists to the country, which is a blend ancient history and modern culture, East and West.

Monitoring by the Azerbaijan Tourism Association shows that a number of hotels and inns reduced prices for their services by 15-30 percent, said Muzaffar Agakerimov, an advisor to the association’s chairman.

“President Ilham Aliyev gave a number of orders with respect to the development of tourism in Azerbaijan at the meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers in the first half of the year, which included the acceleration and simplification of issuing visas online, building two- and three-star hotels and lower prices at the current hotels,” he noted.

Tourism companies and hotels have spent considerable work to achieve this goal, he added.

“According to the monitoring, which inspected 142 hotels mainly in Baku and the Absheron peninsula, most of the hotels cut prices by 15-30 percent. In the near future, prices are expected to be lowered in the rest of the hotels,” Agakerimov said.

Touching upon the issuing of visas online, the adviser said that this issue is also being monitored and negotiations with several major travel companies have achieved some results.

“I can assure you that the simplification process is already underway. Online visas are issued for a maximum of 10 days, and urgent visas are ready in 3-4 days. This is quite a good indicator,” he added.

Agakerimov also noted the importance of developing two- and three-star hotels, which require government support and tax benefits.

“The payback period of hotel business, depending on the number of rooms and the number of stars is five to ten years. Therefore, not everyone is ready to do this business,” he explained. “However, if entrepreneurs will be supported, the creation of two- and three-star hotels will be beneficial for them.”

Furthermore, along with these hotels, we proposed the creation of hostels, which are very popular among tourists with low incomes, mainly among students, he went on to add.

He noted that the association will continue to discuss the development of tourism regularly and will seek ways to solve problems and methods for the further development of tourism in Azerbaijan.

Currently, the country can accommodate over 35,000 tourists in its 530 hotels. The good news here is that prices in tourism areas are not expected to increase this year despite global economic stagnation.

Azerbaijan continues to strive to attract more tourists despite the economic instability of the region.

About one million tourists visited Azerbaijan in the first eight months of this year. Despite the fact that this is 10 percent less than the same period last year, the country stays positive.

The decline is connected to a decrease in the number of tourists coming from neighboring countries. Azerbaijan seems specifically attractive for mainly for tourists from Russia, Turkey, Georgia and Iran, who make 95 percent of Azerbaijan’s tourist base. The economic difficulties in these countries are affecting the number of tourists.

Over 2 million tourists came to Azerbaijan last year, which amounted to about one billion manat (over $950,000 million) in revenue from tourism. In the near future, the country is expected to increase its tourist flow up to 5 million a year.

__

Nigar Orujova is AzerNews’s staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @o_nigar

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz