As Hungary currently holds the Rotating Presidency of the Visegrád Group until 30 June, Hungary hosted the traditional tourism summit of the member countries.
The Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia have been cooperating since 2003 in the field of tourism to jointly increase the number of tourists from third countries. On 4 February, the marketing experts of the Visegrád Four discussed plans and on 5 February the governments’ high-ranking tourism officials expressed their commitment to implementing this year’s common marketing plan by ceremonially signing the protocol of the meeting.
With Deputy State Secretary for Tourism Viktória Horváth as their host the high-ranking tourism officials, aboard a vessel taking the conference participants from Visegrád to Budapest, examined the current status of the countries’ planned projects which are expected to be implemented within the 2014-2020 EU fiscal period and they discussed the potential fields of partnership on the foreign markets that the Visegrád Four is targeting.
Download
The Deputy State Secretary outlined Hungary’s National Tourism Development Concept, the tourism policy blueprint for the next ten years, which focuses on creating a competitive tourism sector. She emphasised that the elaboration of the programme runs parallel to the drafting of other projects for the 2014-2020 EU period and thus the planning of tourism development and that of EU projects are conducted in harmony with each other.
As a remarkable achievement of the Hungarian tourism sector, Viktória Horváth presented data showing marked growth of inbound tourism traffic and the successful SZÉP Card programme which has facilitated the increase of domestic tourism demand.
At the meeting, participants discussed the intention of formulating a common platform with regard to the sustainable tourism development strategy within the Framework Convention on the Protection and Sustainable Development of the Carpathians and weighed options for enhancing cooperation of the Visegrád Four in third countries. The participants also shared with each other those best practices through which issuing visas may become more flexible and which still comply with the common EU visa codex.
Upon the initiation of the Hungarian presidency, at the event opportunities for boosting tourism traffic among the V4 were also debated, as the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia are the 6th, 7th and 13th countries of origin, respectively, of foreign tourists in Hungary.
Common tourism development products were also presented, among them several new versions of the “V4” PocketGuide sightseeing application prepared by a Hungarian team for smart phones which will be made available under the Slovakian Presidency. The new version will contain themed routes of the capital cities of the four countries and related useful information in the Czech, Slovak, Polish and Hungarian languages, while the English language version will contain all the hiking routes and related information for the four countries.
The third countries jointly targeted by the tourism concept are the United States of America, Latin-America, India, China, Japan as well as Singapore, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Australia, South-Africa and the Arab Gulf countries.
In accordance with the plan, an on-line tour operator training programme will be launched in the USA and a team of health tourism experts will also be invited from the States. Presentations and workshops will be held in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Belorussia and Georgia, and roadshows will be organized in some Asian spots of Russia. The Japanese and English language community media campaign in Japan, which has gained popularity over the past years, will be continued, and a common V4 stand will be set up in April at the “WTM Latin-America” exhibition in Sao Paolo and in October at the “ITB-Asia” tourism fair in Singapore.
Following the first introductory steps made last year, the V4 will present itself in Australia and the Republic of South-Africa at two events each.
The V4 countries agreed that tourism, as one of the key sectors of their respective national economies, has been a field of primary importance for each country and cooperation has been a significant factor behind the success of the countries’ tourism sectors.
(Ministry for National Economy)
