Uzbekistan is set to introduce a tourist visa programme to allow international visitors to stay in the country for up to a year without restrictions, VisaGuide reported.

The programme, “Uzbekistan is My Second Home,” is aimed at attracting rich international visitors with good academic knowledge and rich life experience and skills to the territory.

President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has also unveiled a three-year plan to developing the tourism industry, under which major Uzbek cities will receive around $2.4 million in subsidies to lower the cost of airline tickets.

The work to introduce the new immigration visa “Uzbekistan Is My 2nd Home”, began in 2020 with plans that the immigration visa would be developed in two months.

The Uzbek authorities said that specialists would be eligible to live in Uzbekistan on their own and with family members.

A report showed that that as many as seven million foreign citizens visited Uzbekistan for tourism purposes in 2023, showing a 1.3 times increase compared with 2022 when the country welcomed more than 5.2 million tourists from other countries.