SCO Secretary-General attends EAEF panel session on tourism

On 10 September, SCO Secretary-General Vladimir Norov took part in the Silk Road Golden Tourist Corridor panel session of the 2019 Euro-Asia Economic Forum (EAEF) in Xi'an, China.

The session focused on the possibilities for building up tourist potential, the improvement of infrastructure and countries' interaction in this sector as well as on the development of new transborder tourist itineraries.

In his remarks, the Secretary-General noted that tourist cooperation within the SCO is a major component of cultural and humanitarian interaction. The tourism potential of the SCO space that stretches from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean and from Shanghai to Kaliningrad, accounting for 44 percent of the world population, has not yet been fully realised.

"At present, UNESCO's World Heritage List includes 143 sites in the SCO cultural space, which are a potent source of tourism development," stressed Vladimir Norov.

He also pointed out the use of up-to-date technologies for developing the tourist sector and popularising tourist itineraries.

"With the increasing popularity of smart information technologies, such as 5G, big data and AI, smart tourism is opening up great opportunities for the progress of tourism and more and more major tourist cities have adopted smart tourism as their strategic development objective. According to the World Tourism Organisation survey, a quarter of the world's leading clients order tourist products via the internet and the share of e-commerce in tourism has already exceeded 30 percent of the global tourist transactions," said Vladimir Norov.

"Ensuring speedier construction of the global information infrastructure and the government services platform, increasing the potential of the global information applications, and the spread of smart tourism from certain picturesque places and cities to the stage of inter-regional development are important tasks for the SCO member states. Given this, the primary goal is to draft, with the assistance of SCO member states, a programme of smart tourism development in the SCO space," the Secretary-General concluded.

In her remarks, Deputy Secretary-General of China's SCO Committee on Good-Neighbourliness, Friendship and Cooperation Cui Li emphasised the importance of establishing cooperation in the tourist industry and the need to promote projects in this area. The Eight SCO Wonders is a project aimed at the establishment of a single tourist space, giving impetus to cooperation in this sphere. I am sure that the presentation of the Eight SCO Wonders will help familiarise the visitors with the cultural and architectural monuments of the SCO member states. Our committee entirely supports this initiative and we are ready to work together in this area,"

stressed Cui Li.

Professor Bihu Wu of Peking University underscored that "there is a need for a Silk Road golden tourist corridor to develop tourism and cultural exchanges between member states. People have been travelling along the Silk Road since time immemorial. These days, we can use this route for tourist purposes. To this end, we have proposed setting up multimodal centres and called them caravanserais."

At the panel session, Vladimir Norov awarded Deputy Secretary-General of the Euro-Asia Economic Forum Wang Kaiwen with the Secretary-General's commendation for assistance in developing mutually beneficial multilateral cooperation in the SCO space.

The event was attended by high-ranking representatives of SCO member-states, diplomatic missions accredited in Beijing and travel agencies as well as experts and scholars.

The Secretariat's project Eight SCO Wonders, including one tourist destination from each SCO member state, was presented at the forum with the support of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, SCO member states and Xi'an city administration.