Tuesday, April 24, 2012 -
The Kazakh government is interested in following the methods used by Malaysia and Turkey in developing their tourism sectors, a high-ranking Kazakh official said on Tuesday.
“Kazakhstan developing its tourism will make use of its experience of Turkey and Malaysia,” the semi-official news agency Kazinform.kz reported Minister of Industry and New Technologies (MINT) Asset Issekeshev as saying in the Kazakh capital Astana on Tuesday.
Both countries managed to grow their tourism sectors greatly in a relatively short time span, the minister said.
Issekeshev is confident Kazakhstan can attract a fair amount of tourists as the market is growing, he said.
“A new study has found that Kazakhstan is in the center of the most growing market of outbound tourism in the world,” Issekeshev said. “Until 2020, China, Russia, India, and the Middle East are forecasted to increase tourism up to 200 million outbound tourists annually. We should use this potential.”
On Monday, Kazakh Foreign Minister Yerzhan Kazykhanov said that Borat, the much-despised fictional movie character maligned by Kazakh officials for years, has actually increased the amount of tourist traffic to the Central Asian state.