The Vision 2025, a guiding document of ECO, places the tourism sector as one of the organization’s important areas of interest and prioritizes it for regional development. The ECO region is renowned for its natural beauty and diversity of historical-cultural heritage, which echoes the memories of the ancient Silk Road and is now home to 86 UNESCO registered World Heritage Sites.
During the last decade, international travel to the ECO region exceeded 87 million people, holding a total of 6% share in worldwide tourism arrivals in 2019. Considering the region’s potential and population, the ratio between tourist arrivals and total international tourism expenditures is still relatively modest and there is a need for increased regional cooperation to have the optimum use of all available resources to augment regional tourism. The recovery process in the tourism industry that started in 2021 continued increasingly in 2022, and the number of tourists coming to the region exceeded 70 million last year. The increase in the number of tourists continues in 2023, and some ECO Member States are very close to the 2019 level. However, it is expected that the upward trend in the tourism sector will return to its peak level completely in the coming years due to other regional and socioeconomic hindering.
The Organization has extended its support and embarked on different initiatives and policies for the cause of tourism promotion in the region. These policies included number of initiatives like creation of a common regional tourism brand, improving the social media presence of the ECO region, intensifying tourism networking, setting up Tourism Destination Chain and Connectivity among ECO countries, facilitation of the development of common ECO Tourism Visa for the region, organizing meetings of transport, tourism and other relevant authorities to expand connectivity, holding ECO-wide promotional tourism events and etc.
ECO has also established a tradition of selecting cities in member states with rich historical heritage and great tourism potential as the ECO Tourism Capital for each year. This initiative aims to facilitate sustainable development of tourism, local economies, and improve the welfare and standard of living for people in the host city, while also promoting the development of tourism infrastructure.
In this context, 6 different cities have been selected as ECO Tourism Capitals so far: Dushanbe from Tajikistan for 2020 and 2021, Sari from Iran for 2022, Ardabil, another city of Iran, for 2023, Shakhrisabz from Uzbekistan for 2024, Erzurum from Turkey for 2025 and Shusha city of Azerbaijan for 2026 received the title of ECO Tourism Capital. While a proclaiming ceremony for Ardabil as the ECO Tourism Capital held in April 2023, the 5th ECO Ministerial Meeting on Tourism hosted by Ardabil in October 2023 adopted the Ardabil Declaration as a roadmap outlining the priorities of the ECO Member States for tourism sector. In these events, many tourism stakeholders from the ECO Member states came together, private sector representatives had the opportunity for B2B meetings to increase their cooperation, while the city of Ardabil was promoted in the region and on a global scale.
Moreover, ECO brought together tour operators, who have an important position among private sector tourism stakeholders, and created an ECO Tour Operators’ Network in 2022 and it has over 350 tour operators from 9 of the ECO Member States. The main purpose of establishing this network is to provide a different option to tourists outside the region by creating a common tour package covering more than one country and promote the common ECO tourism brand.
In addition, in line with the objectives of the ECO Vision 2025 we try to diversity the tourism products and services and to increase the quality of services for different areas in the field of tourism such as health tourism, religious tourism, gastronomy tourism, mountain and adventure tourism, and winter tourism. We also make efforts to create qualified human resources in the tourism sector organizing trainings and workshops to improve human resource capacity, and to develop cooperation between the ECO Member States in this regard. The ultimate goal of ECO is to support the economic development of the region through the sustainable tourism development and make the region one of the most attractive tourism destinations in the global market.