TEHRAN—Khorasan Razavi province seeks to boost foreign tourism through concentrating on target markets which have cultural, language, and religious commonalities and preparing the ground for contribution of private sector in international collaborations. 

Saeed Barzegar, a senior official of Khorasan Razavi Cultural Heritage Department , told ISNA that the most important duty of the Government is ease the role of private sector in promoting global collaborations. 

The approach has been implemented with follow-ups of Khorasan Razavi governor-general and the provincial tourism chief, he added.

He also said that journeys in form of economic delegations headed by the governors-general  were made to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan.

Issues such as launching and promoting direct flights between the countries, proposing travel packages for pilgrimage, tourism, and health tourism, and introducing investment opportunities in tourism and hoteliering sectors were discussed during business-to-business (B2B) meetings and negotiations conducted during the trips. 

In addition, Khorasan Razavi Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicrafts Department  has numerous program which are as follows: producing international content through using new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), participating in international exhibitions of target markets and the related festivals, supporting the international virtual tourism businesses and activists involved in producing media and introducing the province’s and country’s tourism services and advertisements in them.

He called preparing and compiling dossiers for introducing tourist villages and cities of the province to the UN Tourism as the other program. The dossiers of a tourist village  in Gonabad and holy city of Mashhad are under compilation, he added.

He said that committee for boosting foreign tourism of the province is being formed to use the capacities of other international and related organizations such as the Islamic Culture and Relations Organization (ICRO), Mashhad Municipality  and other entities that can play a role in promoting foreign tourism.

On cultural cooperation with countries which have common language, culture and religion with Iran, he said that Afghanistan and Tajikistan due to joint language and cultural commonalities have high potentials for boosting cultural collaborations. These cultural ties can be promoted through holding ethnic culture events as well as poem and music festivals. 

Also, countries such Iraq, Azerbaijan Republic, Lebanon and parts of Central Asia which have joint religion particularly Shia, can prepare an appropriate ground for promoting cultural and religious cooperation.
This cooperation can be promoted through joint religious customs such as Ramadan and Muharram rituals. 

KD