Starting from next year foreign tourists coming to Azerbaijan might have a chance to get electronic visas, said the high ranking official from Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Azerbaijan. According to Firrudin Gurbanov preparation works are being implemented at the moment. 

Basing upon international experience Azerbaijan will also have a system when a tourist could apply and obtain visas electronically. However, to switch to a new system some technicalities has to be settled, said Mr. Gurbanov. To ease the process of visa obtainment they have reintroduced obtainment of visas in Baku airport. 

We'd like to remind that introduction of e-visas was initially planned in June 2011, however after a week of chaos in Azeri embassies they recognised that the system is not working and shifted back to standard routine process. Visas upon arrival in Baku airport were also existing for quite a long time and were quite handy to travelers, but for some reason were also removed starting from October 15, 2010. Most likely they are getting ready for a large influx of foreign tourist in May next year when Azerbaijan is going to host next Eurovision event. And it is obvious for everyone that with the present visa regime, which is quite complicated and lengthy, they might have experience a serious problems and complains from EU community. 

Another headache according to many experts would obviously be accommodating those 70,000 tourists expected to come to Baku for Eurovision week. With current capacity of Baku hotels to accommodate around 15,000 guest in one day the problem seems unresolvable. They have put a total block on all bookings in Baku hotels for Eurovision week at the moment. Even if you try to book through international booking system you won't find rooms available. In fact, there are rooms available but hotels wait for authorisation from the Ministry of Tourism to start selling them and no one knows at the moment when the block would be lifted or what prices to expect in the end. 

Without taking much effort one could easily suggest that the best solution would be in that case to set up a centralized booking system and process all requests for Baku hotel bookings in one place and control room rates, otherwise hotels would obviously increase them sky-high. But setting up such a system takes time and substantial efforts not mentioning the money and it is highly unlikely it would be efficient taking into consideration time deficit and zero stage preparation at the moment. The most predictable scenario is that they lift all limitations by the end of the year leaving hotels on their own to decide on pricing policy and deal with customers directly. 

 

 

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