TEHRAN,Iran, Feb.18
Trend:
The Ava Gostar Ayande Group in Iran has established a B2B travel website to help facilitate business in Iran, the company's head Mohammad Soutudeh told Trend.
"Our company is bringing to the table the most cohesive B2B reservation system. The online system would connect to 384,000 hotels across the world and reservation is completely online. This eliminates intermediaries, so the main providers are hotels," he said.
He went on to add that another service to be offered is flights reservation.
"We will have access to flight services in 62 countries. This includes scheduled flights, so we will be able to offer lower flight cost to our customers," Soutudeh said.
"We have signed contracts with Azal – Azerbaijani airline, Pegasus and Atlas, and we have possibility of issuing flight tickets from our website, so travelers can easily reserve tickets," he said.
"The signed contract with Azal airline would allow domestic and foreign travel agencies to reserve their Azal airline tickets via our website," he said.
"To develop Iran-Azerbaijan tourism, Iran will offer services to passengers from Azerbaijan, that include health tourism. Some Iranian hospitals have permit to accept foreign patients," he said.
"We have negotiated with the foreign ministry and received permit to issue visas, so patients would not have problems in this regard," he added.
"Such tourists can choose a hospital and send an application, doctors would receive a patient's documents and after their confirmation the costs will be paid and health care process would start," he said. "We do not leave the patient and follow him though all the process until recovery."
Iran's tourism was effected by the recent events including assassination of General Qassem Soleimani and Ukraine plane crash, however the country is looking to bounce back.
Some 7.8 million foreign tourists visited Iran within 10 months (from March 21 through January 20) of this Iranian year (beginning on March 21, 2019). There was a 52-percent increase in the number of tourists compared to the previous year (from March 21, 2017 through March 21, 2018).
President of Iran Hoteliers Association Jamshid Hamzehzadeh had previously said that in Iran's tourism sector the volume of foreign tourists is less than domestic tourists.
"Currently, domestic tourism has improved, and the hotel reservations for Nowruz holiday (starts March 21, 2020) have already been made," Hamzehzadeh said.