Azerbaijan plans to introduce “sea taxi”

Mr. Gurbanov informed that sea taxi will run from Municipal Flag Plaza to Ahmedli area of Baku city and back. At the next stage, the services will be expanded to link Baku with the Nargin peninsula that is undergoing land improvement and infrastructure development. Speedboats will allow to reach Nargin Island for five to eight minutes.

He also noted that administration carefully checked the plans of launching the sea taxis on the route Baku – Lankaran, but this proved to be highly unprofitable. It will take nearly 7 hours to reach Lankaran by sea whilst the trip by road will take half of that time. Besides, sea taxis are very dependent of weather conditions and without guaranteeing a firmed schedule it is very unlikely that somebody will risk to use this service. Besides, it is also going to be more expensive. In the rest, sea taxis are an interesting type of transport to be developed for Baku needs. According to him, there will be 5 directions where sea taxis will operate.

Azerbaijan is seriously considering developing tourism using the potential of Caspian Sea. There have been numerous talks about launching the Caspian sea cruise across all 5 Caspian Sea countries, but there have been little progress. However all sides confirm they should work towards uniting efforts around the beauty of the Caspian region.

Currently Azerbaijan has ferry links only with Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. Ferry service runs relatively regularly though it is mainly cargo ships that not really care about the number of passengers / tourists they can take on board. A number of tourists opting to cross Caspian sea is growing every year and with the joint efforts of all countries involved there could be a great opportunity for developing new tourist routes in Transcaspian region. Unfortunately, all the countries now have strict visa rules, with Turkmenistan being the most notorious and Kazakhstan the most relaxed. Iran and Russia have both complicated visa rules with Letters of Invitations needed to organize the travel into the countries. Azerbaijan is no exclusion as well, though it has introduced eVisa recently that simplified the things for many travelers, but it is still takes 2-3 weeks to secure eVisa to Azerbaijan.