ASTANA – Wizz Air, a Hungarian low-cost carrier, will launch direct flights between Abu Dhabi and Turkistan on Jan. 16, reported the press service of the Turkistan Region.
Photo credit: Wizz Air.
As of Jan. 8, 168 tickets for the first flight have been sold at a price starting from $41 since tickets were put on sale in November 2023. Flights are expected to operate three times a week on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
The number of tourists in the region is growing every year, said Zulfukhar Zholdasov, first deputy akim (governor) of the Turkistan Region, at a Jan. 9 press conference in the Turkistan international airport.
“Turkistan holds high potential for tourism development on both international and regional levels. Visitors are drawn here by historical, architectural, and archaeological landmarks. Turkistan is home to the mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, which is listed on a UNESCO [the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] World Heritage List. The annual attendance of the mausoleum is approximately one million people,” said the Kazakh official.
According to him, over the past five years, the volume of investment in the region’s tourism industry reached 356 billion tenge ($783 million). Around 35 hotels and 30 cultural sites have been opened since the transformation of Turkistan into a regional center in 2018.
Hazret Sultan international airport in Turkistan, which opened in 2020, offers direct flights to Istanbul and Kuwait.
