President Ilham Aliyev signed Azerbaijan's first comprehensive State Tourism Development Programme on August 20, setting a target of 3.8 million annual visitors by 2030, up from 2.57 million today. The H1 2026 data, showing a 10.3% year-on-year decline, explains why the urgency is real. So do the programme's own diagnoses of what is not working.
The timing of the State Programme for Tourism Development is quite instructive. The timing of the State Programme for the Development of Tourism cannot be ignored. During the first half of 2026, almost 1.092 million foreigners came to Azerbaijan; their number decreased compared to last year by 10.3%, due to a combination of a decrease in the number of post-Soviet travelers, fewer tourists from the Middle East and India, and rising airfares because of fuel price hikes associated with the war in the Persian Gulf.
What is crucial, this programme comes not as a codification of an emerging, booming industry but as a counter-strategy to combat the retreat of the tourism industry, which is still unable to recover its pre-crisis level of 3.2 million foreigners per year reached in 2019. Quick look at Azerbaijan's position in the WEF ranking The State Programme cites the World Economic Forum's Travel and Tourism Development Index 2024, in which Azerbaijan ranked 56th of 119 countries. The regional peer comparison this ranking reveals is worth examining carefully, because it defines both the opportunity and the challenge simultaneously.
The Georgia comparison, however, is the most telling and the most difficult. Azerbaijan lags behind Georgia by 11 places in the WEF ranking, but by a much greater gap in real tourist arrivals. In 2024, Georgia attracted more than nine million tourists, which is 3.5 times more than Azerbaijan managed in 2025, despite its smaller size, lack of well-developed hospitality infrastructure, and the absence of Azerbaijan's source of energy income to fund tourism development.
The thing that Georgia has, which Azerbaijan lacks, is an efficient low-cost airline hub in Kutaisi, with Wizz Air serving 23 European destinations out of one single airport, and a visa policy that has traditionally been more open to visitors from Western Europe. During the author's study, conducted at Azerbaijan Technical University in 2025 on the branding of Azerbaijan's tourism destination, 51.6% of the country's foreign tourists found Azerbaijan's tourism brand only "slightly recognizable," which quantitatively reflects the depth of the branding issue highlighted in the WEF ranking. A country that outranks 63 other countries globally but lags behind its closest neighbor by 3.5 times in the number of tourists is facing a problem of product and access, not potential.
However, the point surrounding the issue is not the question of potential, but converting it is. LCCs’ attraction, regional airports, twentyfold flight frequency increase. The programme implies analysis of competitive prices compared to alternative regional destinations, cost-benefit analysis, and subsidization of charter and additional scheduled flights.
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