Adventure tourism is gaining momentum in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan has a vast range of opportunities for such tourism, including mountain skiing to watching pink flamingos. These opportunities were presented at the 25th Moscow International Travel and Tourism Exhibition. The experts of the national company Kazakh Tourism are planning to reset the ties with Russian tourists. Kazakhstan is in the top three most popular travel destinations of Russian tourists. Two and a half million Russian travelers visit Kazakhstan every year. About one million of them look for adventurous leisure opportunities.

KAIRAT SADVAKASSOV, DEPUTY CHAIRMAN, ‘KAZAKH TOURISM’ NATIONAL COMPANY:
- Rafting, paragliding, hiking and trekking and, of course, mountain skiing -we have identified these types of tourism as the trendy ones among the whole range of tourist opportunities that we have, especially for the Russian market where active tourism, auto-tourism are popular.

With visitors from 90 countries and 80 regions of Russi, the Moscow Exhibition is among the world’s top five biggest tourism exhibitions. Profitable business agreements are concluded here. The officials of Kazakh Tourism and Russia’s Federal Agency for Tourism have signed a cooperation memorandum. The representatives of the two countries have decided to jointly promote trans-boundary routes for travellers.

OLEG SAFONOV, HEAD, RUSSIAN FEDERAL AGENCY FOR TOURISM:
- Signing an agreement with the Kazakh Tourism agency is a very important and significant event. For the first time, within the CIS countries, our outbound tour operators’ association officials signed an agreement with their Kazakh counterparts. The tour operators association was established with the aim of protecting the tourists.

The leadership of Kazakh Tourism is planning to increase the tourist inflow in Kazakhstan 30 percent. The long-term objective is even more ambitious. It is to increase tourism industry’s contribution to Kazakhstan’s GDP to 8% in the next seven years.