The XXXV meeting of the Council of Heads of State News Agencies of the CIS countries was held at Issyk-Kul, with tourism among the key issues on the agenda, El.kz reports.
According to Managing Director of Kazinform Naghаshybek Aldan, over the past year, Kazakh journalists had travelled across the country’s tourist regions, collecting materials about prices, infrastructure and tourism conditions. The agency is now ready to share these materials with its counterparts in other CIS countries, with the exchange to be coordinated through designated representatives at each news agency responsible specifically for tourism-related information exchange.
The initiative was also supported by TASS Director General Andrey Kondrashov. He noted that the CIS countries continue to discover destinations for one another, including places that neighbouring countries had previously known little about. Ancient routes coexist with newly developing tourism clusters, and both categories deserve greater attention.
Director of Kyrgyzstan’s Kabar news agency Mederbek Shermetaliyev highlighted the upcoming VI World Nomad Games. He called on his counterparts to give the event broad coverage and ensure that audiences outside Kyrgyzstan are also informed about it.
Kazakhstan has considerable experience to contribute to this discussion. The Caspian Sea coast, the Trans-Ili Alatau mountains, the canyons of Mangystau and the lakes of Burabay have in recent years gained increasing prominence as independent tourism destinations alongside the region’s established tourism centres. The development of tourism infrastructure has been accompanied by growing domestic demand: Kazakh citizens are increasingly choosing to travel within the country rather than abroad, followed by a growing number of tourists from neighbouring states.
Joint tourism routes appear to be a logical next step. Travellers from Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan do not require a visa to enter Kazakhstan and reach Almaty, from where Issyk-Kul and Samarkand are also within relatively easy reach. The unified information flow agreed upon by the heads of the news agencies could help translate this geographical proximity into tangible tourism products, making cross-border travel itineraries as straightforward to plan as trips to neighbouring cities.
The outcome of the meeting can be summed up simply: if CIS news agencies move beyond discussing cooperation at forums and begin systematically exchanging tourism-related content, people in neighbouring countries will gain a better understanding of each other’s destinations and may be encouraged to travel to one another more frequently.
