For two weeks, representatives of more than 190 countries will gather in the capital of our country. At least this is how many participants attended this year’s climate summit in Dubai. The government has already tasked the government agencies with starting preparations for the event. There is not much time left. Given that according to the data of the State Statistics Committee for 2022, there are 727 hotels and other accommodation facilities in the country, with a daily capacity of 56,562, of which 27,312 in Baku, Azerbaijan will have to resolve the problem of shortage of hotels and accommodation in general in the shortest possible time, and it must be done at the highest level.
In the context of preparations for COP29, the activity of the agency responsible for the development of tourism in Azerbaijan raises many questions. And the state of tourism in the country, frankly speaking, is not the best, although the number of tourists is regularly reported to be growing year by year.
And it is not even about COP29 and the problems of accommodating its participants. The question is: why are these unappealing figures reflecting the situation in the tourism sector coming up now, 11 months before COP29? Why is the state of tourism in our country at a level where these problems have to be tackled in a hurry?
Take a look around you. Can you see now, so close to the New Year’s Eve, a single advertisement about a festive event organized by the State Tourism Agency of Azerbaijan (STA)? Have you seen crowds of people in the squares where adults and children would enjoy watching clowns, singers, actors? Maybe we have none of this because we do not have a comprehensive concept of development of the country’s tourism industry for decades to come? Something faintly resembling such a document will come into existence only in August 2024, because this year the STA has signed an agreement with Triumph-M LLC, a name that tells us nothing, to produce design and estimate documentation for creating tourist infrastructure in accordance with the “Tourist Village” concept in villages with tourism potential. AZN 200,000 has been allocated for this purpose…
Speaking of money. For years, the STA has been paying close attention to the development of tourism by promoting our country abroad, which is why stands about Azerbaijan are displayed at international tourism exhibitions. For example, today the STA plans to organize participation of Azerbaijani travel companies at the international tourism exhibition in Madrid on January 24-28, 2024. In this regard, the selection of a contractor for turnkey installation of the exhibition stand has been announced. Prior to this, the STA had taken a similar initiative to prepare a turnkey exhibition stand at the Barcelona Tourism Expo, held on November 28-30 this year. For this purpose, a Vitam LLC was granted AZN 195,643 thousand. And before that, the STA allocated hundreds of thousands of manats for similar purposes for exhibitions in Beijing (November 15-17), Tashkent (November 15-17), Doha (November 20-22), etc. It is beneficial to travel to Barcelona and Beijing and talk about Azerbaijan, isn’t it? At least for those who travel at public expense. But how beneficial is it for Azerbaijan? Do we have many tourists from the countries where these presentation exhibition events of the State Tourism Agency were held? No such statistics is available. Too bad, because it would allow to reveal the return on investment of state funds in these events. Maybe it does exist, but it is not publicized, because it looks unfavorable, or maybe no one simply makes such calculations? After all, the main thing is that the STA reports that an Azerbaijani pavilion was displayed here and there, and the participants of the exhibition were informed about our country. You will agree that this can hardly be called a reasonable (at least on a national scale) approach to solving the problems in the Azerbaijani tourism sector.
Speaking of the state of tourism. Even an average Azerbaijani cannot afford a vacation in a four-star hotel somewhere in the region, not in a five-star hotel, because the prices are exorbitant. Imagine that a New Year’s night in one of the hotels in Qusar District costs 1,400 manats per person. That is, if an Azerbaijani has 1,500 manats to spare, they will not hesitate to take a last-minute travel offer to go to Europe or Türkiye or Georgia, and more than for one day, and will enjoy their vacation so much more, because the same services are cheaper there, much cheaper than in Azerbaijan. This explains why the majority of Azerbaijani citizens prefer domestic wild tourism to hotel vacations. Add to this the still unresolved problem of hotels refusing to accommodate unmarried couples in one room. These are by far not the only unsightly aspects of domestic tourism that Azerbaijanis are always angry about. European tourists, on the other hand, are picky and practical, and will not waste money if they are not sure of the results.
Why don’t we learn from neighboring Georgia, for example? By the way, tourism in Georgia is an important component of the national economy. The tourism sector accounts for about 7.3% of the country’s GDP and is a rapidly growing industry.
On the other hand, no one says that the overall statistics on tourists in Azerbaijan looks bad. On the contrary, the figures reported by STA officials delight the ears. For example, according to the agency, the tourist flow to Azerbaijan for the first half of 2023 increased by 44%, which in absolute terms looks as follows: about 920,000 tourists from 181 countries of the world.
Look, there are only 205 countries in the world and it turns out that people come to us from almost every corner of the world. This begs a very simple question: if Azerbaijan is such a popular tourist destination in the world, why is the tourism statistics of Georgia, a much smaller country than ours, many times higher than Azerbaijan’s? In the first half of this year, this country was visited by 2.8 million guests, of which 1.9 million people came for purely tourist purposes, which is twice as much as in our country.
Note that Georgians clearly distinguish between people who simply entered their country and those who came for vacation purposes. Meanwhile, the STA shares the total statistics of arrivals, because it looks more favorable that way. For reference, 60 percent of countries in the world follow, so to speak, the method of our agency and report the total figures based on the data of customs and border guards. And the remaining 40 percent of the countries clearly divide visitors into tourists and those who came for, say, a business visit.
What is a business visit? Suppose someone entered Azerbaijan to attend an international exhibition. In 2022, representatives of about 1,500 companies from 50 countries attended such events in Baku, twice as many as in 2021 and 20% more than in pre-pandemic 2019. Clearly, these exhibitions brought together hundreds of thousands of people in total. So, how do we categorize them? As tourists or as people who came, did their time at the exhibition and left? The STA classifies them as tourists…
There is one more thought-provoking detail in the STA statistics. The following figures appear in the data for the first half of the year: 72.2 percent of the total number of tourists who visited our country are men and only 27. 8 percent are women. Why is it that mostly men come to Azerbaijan for tourism purposes? If we were talking about famous resorts of Thailand and red-light districts, which attract men from all over the world, it would be somehow understandable. But Azerbaijan with its strict morals in this context clearly does not fit into this category. That is why the explanation of this statistics is simple: it is mainly men who go to all kinds of international conferences. And the STA, in turn, classifies them as tourists.
We could talk for a long time about the problems of Azerbaijani tourism, which during the coming year, up to the start of COP29, will come up in full force. But one should think the main problem is the lack of creativity in the work of the STA, lack of creativity and initiative. In Georgia, the state agency uses anything and everything to attract tourists. But in our country, we spend so much effort and money to develop a concept or just to hold an event that we are often late with deadlines, and tourists do not find what we have done that interesting. Here is an example: by 2027 Azerbaijan plans to develop an electronic catalog of national cuisine dishes, a joint project of the Tourism Bureau and the STA. Almost forgotten recipes of Azerbaijani cuisine and the concept of street food are being developed, with a special emphasis on… qutab and its popularization. Why develop any concepts when today you can eat tasty qutab in many food outlets and even in special gastronomic stalls behind the Neftchilar market?
Does this really call for special concepts and all sorts of large-scale state-led efforts, and a four-year development timeframe? All it takes is a little: creating conditions for entrepreneurs to get them interested in business and healthy competition. Who are we fooling?
If the State Tourism Agency has a different opinion on this matter, we are ready to get their views across to the public.
Muzaffar Abdurahmanov
Translated from Minval.az
