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President Ilham Aliyev signed Azerbaijan's first comprehensive State Tourism Development Programme on August 20, setting a target of 3.8 million annual visitors by 2030, up from 2.57 million today. The H1 2026 data, showing a 10.3% year-on-year decline, explains why the urgency is real. So do the programme's own diagnoses of what is not working.

The timing of the State Programme for Tourism Development is quite instructive. The timing of the State Programme for the Development of Tourism cannot be ignored. During the first half of 2026, almost 1.092 million foreigners came to Azerbaijan; their number decreased compared to last year by 10.3%, due to a combination of a decrease in the number of post-Soviet travelers, fewer tourists from the Middle East and India, and rising airfares because of fuel price hikes associated with the war in the Persian Gulf. What is crucial, this programme comes not as a codification of an emerging, booming industry but as a counter-strategy to combat the retreat of the tourism industry, which is still unable to recover its pre-crisis level of 3.2 million foreigners per year reached in 2019.

Quick look at Azerbaijan's position in the WEF ranking

The State Programme cites the World Economic Forum's Travel and Tourism Development Index 2024, in which Azerbaijan ranked 56th of 119 countries. The regional peer comparison this ranking reveals is worth examining carefully, because it defines both the opportunity and the challenge simultaneously.

The Georgia comparison, however, is the most telling and the most difficult. Azerbaijan lags behind Georgia by 11 places in the WEF ranking, but by a much greater gap in real tourist arrivals. In 2024, Georgia attracted more than nine million tourists, which is 3.5 times more than Azerbaijan managed in 2025, despite its smaller size, lack of well-developed hospitality infrastructure, and the absence of Azerbaijan's source of energy income to fund tourism development. The thing that Georgia has, which Azerbaijan lacks, is an efficient low-cost airline hub in Kutaisi, with Wizz Air serving 23 European destinations out of one single airport, and a visa policy that has traditionally been more open to visitors from Western Europe. During the author's study, conducted at Azerbaijan Technical University in 2025 on the branding of Azerbaijan's tourism destination, 51.6% of the country's foreign tourists found Azerbaijan's tourism brand only "slightly recognizable," which quantitatively reflects the depth of the branding issue highlighted in the WEF ranking. A country that outranks 63 other countries globally but lags behind its closest neighbor by 3.5 times in the number of tourists is facing a problem of product and access, not potential. However, the point surrounding the issue is not the question of potential, but converting it is.

Programme's ambitions

LCCs’ attraction, regional airports, twentyfold flight frequency increase. The programme implies analysis of competitive prices compared to alternative regional destinations, cost-benefit analysis, and subsidization of charter and additional scheduled flights. LCCs’ attraction to regional airports, which are mentioned as one of programme priorities, will help fill the gap that prevented Gabala, Lankaran, and Ganja from having any passenger flow. Flight frequency on the current routes will increase twentyfold. Four new routes are expected to be launched by 2030.

34 visa-free countries + digital nomad visa + multiple-entry e-Visa. The programme commits to visa-free access for citizens of 34 target tourism markets by 2030, up from 17 currently, with 28 as an interim target. A digital nomad visa subtype will be introduced in 2027–2028. Multiple-entry e-Visa procedures will be updated. These measures directly target the Western European and North American visitor segments that current visa requirements deter and that generate the highest per-visitor spending.

3 new tourism zones + 3 tourism centres + 8 new hiking routes. Three new tourism and recreation zones will be created in 2027–2030, with at least three tourism centres established within them and master development plans prepared for each. Eight new mountain hiking routes will be identified, marked, and digitally mapped, adding to the 40 existing routes. Transport accessibility improvements for regional destinations, including railway GDS integration and tourist ticket packages, directly address the connectivity gap that keeps foreign visitors in Baku.

Tourism Ambassador Programme + unified information system: A new Tourism Ambassador Programme will be established — a structured influencer and advocate network that complements the Azerbaijan Tourism Bureau's existing digital channels. The programme also envisages a unified national tourism information system.

Charter, route, event, operator, and accommodation subsidies: Subsidy mechanisms covering charter flights, additional scheduled routes, tourism event organisers, tour operators by foreign tourist volume, and micro/small accommodation businesses will be developed and implemented in 2026–2027. The Law on Tourism (2021) will be revised within six months. Investment incentive certificates for tourism projects will be restructured within three months. These mechanisms are the enabling conditions for private investment at the scale the programme's value-added targets require.

Health tourism strategy + 5 culinary festivals annually + Tourist Village framework. Perhaps it is one of the best additions, if not the best. A strategy and action plan for health and wellness tourism will be developed, alongside an annual Health and Wellness Tourism Conference. At least five culinary festivals per year in the regions, alongside gastronomic championships, will develop the food tourism offer that research consistently identifies as a high-conversion product. A regulatory framework for the "Tourist Village" concept creates the legal architecture for rural and ecotourism development that current legislation does not adequately support.

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The programme is remarkably forthright about the underlying issues it seeks to address, which gives it credibility over its predecessors and practical utility for investors trying to understand where real opportunity lies. The willingness to state bluntly that the industry has been motivated by "inertia," that service quality is lacking, and that prices are not competitive is an honest starting point that many national tourism initiatives fail to reach. The loss of 10.3% of visitors in H1 2026 is a significant blow to a sector already operating at levels below the pre-Covid peak. While the hike in fares resulting from the Gulf conflict situation is in part exogenous to Azerbaijan, the lack of competition in the form of low-cost carriers on Azerbaijani routes is an endogenous structural issue which has left the country vulnerable to fuel costs in a way it need not have been.

The target rate of annual visitation growth of 8.1% suggests that the programme will need to achieve 3.8 million foreign visitors by 2030 – a highly ambitious yet theoretically attainable goal provided that the aviation and visa facilitation measures will take effect on time. The investment needed to ensure that tourists choose Azerbaijan as a destination, rather than find out about it after arriving there, is the least clear part of the action plan. At least the Ambassador Programme is a step in this direction. The amount of digital investment necessary to catch up with Georgia in terms of social media presence is substantially higher than any existing budget provision.

What this programme means, in its totality, is the most structurally sound tourism policy document Azerbaijan has put together – a five-year strategy with clearly set numerical objectives, a roadmap with implementation agencies and timescales, and a forthright assessment of the structural barriers that need to be overcome. Whether it delivers 3.8 million visitors by 2030 will depend on the rapid execution of the aviation policy intervention that will be able to stop and then reverse the negative trend witnessed in H1 2026; on the visa facilitation process that will touch upon Western European markets, where the per visitor revenue is the highest; and on the regional tourism development that will create products for tourists to visit destinations other than Baku. These are all realistic prerequisites. But they are far from being certain ones. The programme has identified the right challenges. It’s all about execution next. And, lastly, with all that has been said, hopefully the possible reopening of the borders would also lead to better numbers for the programme.