Initiatives To Encourage Health Tourism To Azerbaijan

According to Azernews.az, the Azerbaijan Tourism Board considers the Chinese market to be one of the priorities for attracting tourists. Companies in Azerbaijan specialising in health tourism are apparently eager to attract 2,000 more tourists per year, on the basis of the Azerbaijan-Chinese tourism companies cooperation agreement signed in 2018.

The article claims that the Azerbaijan Tourism Board considers the Chinese market to be one of the priorities for attracting tourists, and that since 2017, the tourism potential of Azerbaijan has been more actively promoted in this country.

It states that Chinese experts say that about 1 million Chinese patients travel abroad every year for health tourism. No source of this data was given.

The article suggests that Chinese citizens will mostly like Azerbaijan’s Naftalan for health treatments.

Chinese travel company ETI-Holidays is apparently planning to launch flights from another Chinese city (besides Beijing) to Azerbaijan in 2020.

The article says that between January-June 2019, Azerbaijan was visited by 1.4 million foreign tourists, which recorded 86,000 tourists or 6.5% growth compared to the same period of 2018. 54,100 tourists from Central Asia visited Azerbaijan (an increase of 38%). It says that Azerbaijan’s main tourist markets of South Asia are India (27,000 tourists, increase of 80.2%) and Pakistan (19,000 tourists, increase of 24.4%).