Kazakhstan is new favourite for gap year travellers

Saturday, 25 Jan, 2007 0

A poll of 2,800 gap year and long-term travellers worldwide has named Kazakhstan as number three in their wishlist of European countries they want to visit.

The survey, by gap year website www.TravellersConnected.com, found Italy was the most popular, with 22% of the vote, whilst the UK came second with 18%, and Kazakhstan came third with 16%.

Following closely behind were Spain (12%), France (10%) and Greece (7%).

Kazakhstan has been thrown into the limelight by the recent film, Borat, by Sacha Baron-Cohen.

Alastair Banks, one of the seven TravellersConnected.com founders, said: “It’s really quite fantastic what Borat has done to raise the public profile of Kazakhstan.

“For the country to get more votes than Spain demonstrates the sheer power of the media. When we compiled the same survey last year Kazakhstan barely got any votes at all!

“We understand that Kazakh president Nursaltan Nazarbayev thought that Borat had damaged the world’s perception of Kazakhstan. For the right reasons or wrong, it looks however that the film has really put the country on the map.”

Air Astana has now put a third scheduled weekly flight into Almaty from London to cope with surge in demand.

By Bev Fearis

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Bev

Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.

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