Azernews.Az

By Sabina Idayatova

The twinning project on the "Strengthening the capacity of the Department of Tourism in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Azerbaijan" has successfully accomplished the (its) planned activities for the 3rd quarter of 2013.

These activities have produced high priority tourism projects such as organization of regional workshops, issues of licensing, development of marketing strategy, establishment of tourism foundation and statistics.

The workshops named "Regional and Local Tourism Planning and Management" were successfully organized by the project in Ismailli and Lankaran in September. The project experts familiarized the participants with core principles of Tourism Destination Management, shared with them success stories from Austrian practice and preconditioning aspects as well as developed ideas towards their particular destination management.

The resident twinning advisor Daiva Chetcuti and project expert responsible for the legislative component Michael Raffling have been in the Delegation of the European Union in Azerbaijan and met with the Head of Operations Federico Berna and Task Manager Parviz Yusifov at the beginning of November. During the meeting the new Licensing law was discussed. Also the project experts explored the possibility of facilitating the conditions and regulation of rural tourism.

At the same time, a former Chief Executive of the English Tourist Board, Tim Bartlett, who visited Azerbaijan in October as a short-term expert - worked for four weeks in close collaboration with the Department of Tourism (DoT) on the development of a three-year Tourism Marketing Strategy (2014-2016). The strategy, which has now been fully drafted and agreed upon with the DoT, emphasizes the necessity for more focus on short listed markets in order to make maximum use of limited resources. It has identified the nine overseas target markets on which Azerbaijan should concentrate over the next three years.

The strategy also determines appropriate tourism products for these markets, the key demographic segments to target and the most effective channels of communication. Moreover, the need to create a network of oversees representatives and other key tasks and aspects have been also mentioned in the strategy.

The issue of a tourism support foundation also was not left aside. The representative of the Austrian Tourism Bank Gerfried Brunner visited Baku to provide further input and support the Department of Tourism with advice on the establishment of a tourism support foundation.

The idea is to propose EU`s best practice example of the Austrian Tourism Bank, functioning as a similar foundation in Austria, which with over 40 employees is successfully supporting about 1500-2000 SME tourism projects a year.

The proposed task for the tourism foundation in Azerbaijan would define the portfolio strategy and closely link it to the General tourism strategy and Government's priorities.

The foundation will be responsible for creating comprehensive Guidelines of the subsidy-program for investors; provide learning and training opportunities for employees in the tourism industry. In addition to the financial benefits the foundation will help with application of tourism know-how.

The quarter was summarized by the latest visit of the Former Director General of Statistics Austria, the Austrian national statistical office Peter Hackl. The expert participated in the Workshop "Tourism Statistics", which was held at the State Statistics Committee. During the meeting a presentation was delivered describing the present status of tourism statistics based on the official publications of the Statistics Committee.

The results of the above mentioned activities will be confirmed in the 3rd Steering Committee Meeting, which will be held on December 3rd 2013 in the RTA office, with a corresponding presentation delivered by the twinning team to the participants of the meeting.

Separate attention will be paid to the upcoming objectives of Component 4, which is to assist the Department of Tourism in leading the process of establishing and managing a model of ''Tourism and Recreation Areas'' for the pilot project in Naftalan. Together with the representatives of the Department of Tourism project experts will finalize the results and will present a complete solution regarding the applicability of theory on practice as one of the planned tasks of the 3rd Component of the project.