Press releases

19 Nov 2025

Minsk to host series of hospitality industry events in April 2026

An archive photo

MINSK, 19 November (BelTA) – For the first time ever Minsk will become a venue for the Big Tourism Week on 7-11 April 2026. The initiative combines key events of the tourism industry, the restaurant industry, and the hotel industry, the press service of the Republican Union of Tourism Industry told BelTA.

Over the course of five days the Minsk Marriott Hotel, the Falcon Club arena, and the Minsk International Expo Center will host international forums, exhibitions, a gastronomic award ceremony, and a business matchmaking session.

The ceremony to present the second international gastronomic award Where to Eat Belarus will take place on 7 April. As many as 50 best restaurants of the country will be named during the ceremony. The first ceremony took place in 2025 and gathered over 300 guests to become a landmark event for the restaurant industry. The winners are ranked as a result of voting by secret ballot by a broad panel of experts, who work in the restaurant business and allied trades and live in Belarus.

The project is held every year in Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. In December 2025 it will also take place in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Georgia. By pooling results of all the seven rankings the organizers intend to hold a final ceremony in Moscow next spring and create a single ranking of the best restaurants of the seven countries.

Another significant event is scheduled for 7-9 April when the 34th international HoReCa Minsk Expo will take place to highlight equipment, products, and solutions for the hospitality industry. Over 50 companies from Belarus, Russia, Italy, and Iran took part in the expo last year. Over 3,500 guests attended the expo while the business program of over 40 events featured 26 speakers and nearly 700 participants. Those are specialists of the Hotel, Restaurant, Café (HoReCa) industry and the hospitality industry, owners and proprietors of businesses, heads of various divisions, managers.

In 2026 the exposition is supposed to expand. It will feature a vigorous program of workshops, contests, and business meetings. The expo is expected to cover about 20 business areas: process equipment, concepts for fast food outlets, innovative information technologies for the HoReCa segment, comprehensive solutions for equipping hotels, inns, restaurants, professional uniforms, and many other things. The business program will focus on food security, aspects of the ready-to-eat food market, personnel training for the hospitality industry, the development of professional competences, and the popularization of the Belarusian national cuisine.

The 4th Belarusian-Russian Tourism Congress will take place on 7-8 April. It has become an annual venue for a dialogue between representatives of the tourism industry, ministries, and regional administrations of the two countries where they come together to resolve topical problems of the tourism industry. The Republican Union of Tourism Industry is the initiator and the organizer of the congress. In 2025 the congress gathered about 800 representatives of the tourism industry from Belarus and nearly 15 regions of Russia, including Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, the Udmurt Republic, Murmansk Oblast, Voronezh Oblast, Smolensk Oblast, Kaluga Oblast, Vladimir Oblast, and other regions.

The business program of the congress includes a plenary session, domain-specific professional panel sessions, and roundtable sessions, presentations, and a business matchmaking session in the B2B format. The main topics are legislative initiatives, support for private business, investments, the formation of the Union State tourism product, joint routes, seamless travels for citizens from third countries, particularly from the Middle East and Asia, integration into the Eurasian Economic Union and the development of Eurasian tourism, human resources, visa liberalization, tourism digitization, and many other things.

According to Filipp Guly, Chairman of the Board of the Republican Union of Tourism Industry, the notion of tourism today has gone far beyond one’s perceptions of holidaymaking, leisure, or travels. Tourism is a genuine economy branch that brings together about 50 spheres of economy. Tourism is about big investments, new jobs, revenues for the state budget and a huge number of accompanying manufacturing facilities that provide everything one needs to travel in comfort.

“The tourism industry is a dynamic, strategically important branch of the national economy. It is no accident that in September the president signed a decree on important changes in tourism regulations. The Belarusian-Russian Tourism Congress in spring will become a reflection of these large-scale transformations. It grows, develops, and attracts an increasingly large number of participants and topics,” Filipp Guly noted.

The Travel Hub Commonwealth forum organized by the Interparliamentary Assembly of the Commonwealth of Independent States will take place on 7-8 April. The forum will bring together representatives of government agencies, travel agencies and associations from the CIS states. In 2025 the forum gathered over 600 people from Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and other countries. It resulted in recommendations on promoting interstate tourism routes and sustainable development of tourism in the Commonwealth of Independent States. The topics that will be expanded in 2026 include active mountain tourism, farm tourism, and ecological tourism. But close attention will also be paid to patriotic tourism and opportunities for creating new tourism products.

The week will end with the 28th international expo of tourism services Leisure that will take place in the Minsk International Expo Center. It is the main tourism expo that Belarusian and foreign professionals of the tourism business know well. The expo traditionally gathers leading travel agencies, regions, and national tourism offices. In 2025 it gathered over 626 exhibitors from nine countries: Belarus, Russia, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Oman, Cuba, Palestine, Kyrgyzstan, and Türkiye. Russia’s combined exposition was one of the most versatile and feature-rich ones. Stands and presentations were prepared by Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kaliningrad, by Leningrad Oblast, Pskov Oblast, Voronezh Oblast, and other regions.

Over the course of several days nearly 8,500 people visited the expo. The next year’s program is expected to be as intensive: Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions (MICE) tourism, medical tourism, sport tourism, education trips, excursion programs, transport services, and tours for children.

The Big Tourism Week 2026 will bring together experts, investors, representatives of businesses and mass media in Minsk. It will turn the Belarusian capital city into the center of an international discussion about the future of tourism, hospitality, and gastronomy. The organizers are convinced that such integration of professional venues within the framework of one event will produce a powerful synergistic effect from interaction of representatives of the hotel business, the restaurant business, and the tourism business and that it will launch new ideas and projects.



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