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Regional Tourism Cooperation for Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan & Georgia www.caps.am
For the first time, certainly in recent history, tourism industry representatives from Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia came together to discuss regional cooperation on 13th and 14th December at a workshop and B2B event in Istanbul, Turkey.
The main purpose of this event was to demonstrate long-term potential for regional route development and industry cooperation among the four countries, and identify mutual interests in creating and presenting a regional brand (as a joint regional tourism destination) to the world.
This 2-day event was organized by the USAID-funded Human and Institutional Capacity Development (HICD) Program implemented by AED Armenia (Academy for Educational Development). They also provided support to enable Armenian tourism industry representatives to attend the event. Support was also received from GTZ (enabling participation of Georgian & Azeri participants) and TURSAB (encouraging participants from Turkey. Armenia’s participants comprised 8 Tour Operators and representatives from ATDA (Armenian Tourism Development Agency), AED and the CAPS (Competitive Armenian Private Sector) Project. Ten participants from Georgia, 10 from Azerbaijan and 40 from Turkey were also present.
A workshop on the first day of the event enabled Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan to present their countries to each other and later, with Turkey, discuss possible creation of regional products which could include all four countries.
On the second day a B2B event among the tour operators from Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan commenced activities. Then later, Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan presented their countries to Turkish tour operators and discussed business opportunities.
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