It is already 5th day as the 1st Baku Shopping Festival has kicked off. This new initiative is very promising and ambitious. Baku is competing in this field with very experienced Dubai Shopping Festival and relatively new Istanbul Shopping Festival.

Dubai Shopping Festival was launched in 1996 by Scheikh Maktum bin Rashid Al Maktum in order to attract more tourists and customers to this promising and ambitious Emirate city. And now looking back we can approve that Dubai Shopping Festival has achieved its goals. Today we can unambiguously say that this Festival is a great success for this Gulf city. Today`s Dubai is the main shopping and tourism destination in our geography of Middle East.

According to data up today more than 56 million tourists have visited Dubai Shopping Festival, 22nd of which was organized just recently: December 2016 – January 2017. Billions of US Dollars were spent during these tremendous shopping events. More than 6 thousands trade centers, shops and other units of trade took part and are going to take part in the Festival offering variety of goods. Dubai is now well-known tourist and shopping destination of the world due to this Shopping Festival as well.

Following Dubai, a city in two continents – Istanbul of Turkey succeeded the baton of festival. The 1st Festival was initiated in 2011 and lasted for 40 days. That was something new for this great city for those days. But now Istanbul is among very attractive tourist and shopping destinations of our bigger region.

Dubai, Istanbul. Which city would be next? That was a question for quite a long time. And Baku is enough brave to answer this question. “We are the next and with great ambitions”, says this shining star of the Caucasus and former Soviet Union.

On April 10, 2017 the 1st Baku Shopping Festival has kicked off on the shores of Caspian Sea. This is not as huge as Dubai or Istanbul festivals. But very promising. For the 1st time just hundreds of trade points are offering goods and services to customers with discounts and VAT paid back. For now we don`t have clear data on how many goods and services are sold and how much money was spent. But as we can see through national and even international media, the Festival has attracted sometimes crowds of customers and tourists. So Baku has started one more ambitious project with promising perspective. After many international–global sports, economic, political and cultural events Baku has the right to be among competitors in this field as well.

The organizers of Baku Shopping Festival expressed hope and believe that they will achieve those goals within 1-2 years. This means they will bring more and more tourists to Azerbaijan. And this means that Azerbaijan`s goal to get more tourists through Shopping Festival will add new capabilities to strengthen economy which was a bit weakened due to falling oil prices on the world market last two years.

Azerbaijan opens up itself to the world with new and attracting opportunities and the practice approves that this brings great successes. So the 1st Baku Shopping Festival is one more ring in the chain of promising ambitions of Azerbaijan.

Azer Hasret