Azerbaijan expects restoration of domestic tourism, then opening of borders and recovery of global tourism in 2021, Spokesman for the State Tourism Agency Kanan Guluzade told Trend.

According to Guluzade, tourists, who will come to Azerbaijan after the borders’ opening, will feel protected from COVID-19.

“After the opening of the borders, people will prefer domestic tourism for some time, avoiding trips abroad. Of course, these trips will be carried out on new rules," he said.

He also noted that the SAHMAN program, developed in 2020, has already been presented to foreign partners.

As the spokesman pointed out, after the opening of the borders, in the post-pandemic period, intense work is expected to be carried out, since there will be strong and different competition.

“We are preparing the tourism sector for this, in parallel working on making institutional decisions in connection with passenger transportation and the border crossing system. These issues are being discussed to facilitate travels to Azerbaijan," Guluzade said.

Reminding that the past year was a crisis year for world tourism, he added that the crisis also affected Azerbaijani tourism, and to compensate for this damage, the state provided assistance to people working in the tourism sector.

"Due to the closure of borders since March last year, first external and then internal tourism stopped, so everything that was planned last year remained unrealized. In 2019, Azerbaijan was visited by 3.2 million foreign tourists, and we expected that in 2020 this figure would increase by 10 percent, but this hasn’t happened for reasons beyond our control," he concluded.