The room at PC Hotel Karachi was full of dignitaries.
Keynote speeches. National anthems. Governor-level guests flying in from Iran. The CEO of Pakistan International Airlines in the front row. Tourism board heads from Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Turkey, and beyond.
January 21st and 22nd, 2026.
The Sustainable Tourism Forum & Expo 2026. Second edition. Organized by the Islamic Chamber of Commerce and Development (ICCD), representing 57 OIC member countries.
I was there.
And I came back with a very specific thought: the people running Pakistan’s tourism future are saying all the right things. The question is whether anyone is actually changing the way they sell travel.
Because the conversation in that room and the conversation inside most Pakistani travel agencies? Two completely different worlds.
What Is the Sustainable Tourism Forum & Expo, and Why Should Travelers Care?
Most people hear “tourism forum” and picture government officials shaking hands for cameras.
That’s partly true.
But the ICCD Sustainable Tourism Forum is also something more specific. It’s a two-day session where investment, halal travel, medical tourism, cultural heritage, and AI-driven travel technology all get debated in front of real decision-makers.
Day One opened with keynote speeches from dignitaries, followed immediately by a session on Tourism Diplomacy for Building Global Investment and Partnerships. Then four concurrent streams: a panel on investment and partnerships in sustainable tourism, a panel on medical tourism, a workshop on heritage management for cultural sites and museums, and two symposiums, one on top global sustainable destinations and one on promoting education for tourism development.
Day Two hit harder. A roundtable on private sector investment. A panel on sustainable destination management and joint venture opportunities. A panel on tourism through technology and artificial intelligence. A workshop on how natural disasters and climate change affect tourism. And Workshop 3, which stopped me cold.
Halal Tourism to Facilitate Muslim Travelers.
I’ll come back to that.
What Does “Sustainable Tourism” Actually Mean for a Pakistani Family Planning a Trip?
This is where most coverage of events like this goes wrong.
They report the panels. They quote the speakers. They don’t ask the one question that matters to a real family in Karachi deciding where to travel next year.
“How does any of this change my trip?”
The answer right now is: it doesn’t. Not yet. Not if you’re booking through a typical package agency.
That’s the gap.
The Sustainable Tourism Forum is a conversation about the future. A package agency is selling you 2019.
Packages are designed to be sold a thousand times. Same itinerary. Same hotels. Same operator on the ground who’s never met you and never will. The package doesn’t know your children can’t eat at certain restaurants. It doesn’t know you want three days in one place, not one day in three places. It doesn’t know you need a hotel where the prayer call is nearby, not an hour away.
Sustainable tourism, in its actual definition, is about trips that work for the traveler, the destination, and the community. Individualized. Thoughtful. Built around real needs.
That’s a custom trip. Not a package.
What the Halal Tourism Workshop Got Right (and What Still Needs to Happen)
Workshop 3 on Day Two was titled Halal Tourism to Facilitate Muslim Travelers.
I sat through it. And I’ll give it this: the conversation is now officially on the table at an international level.
The problem is that most of what gets discussed in panels stays in panels.
Rahat, my wife and co-founder of Zaviamo, spent years at Qatar Airways. She’s watched the aviation and tourism industry from the inside. She’ll tell you the same thing: knowing something is broken and actually fixing it for the traveler sitting in front of you are two entirely different skills.
The forum knows halal tourism matters. The panel knows Muslim families need hotel breakfast options that don’t require them to scan every ingredient. The symposium knows that a traveler from Karachi going to Turkey or Malaysia or Indonesia deserves restaurants they can walk into without guessing.
But knowing it and building your business around it?
That’s where most agencies still fail. They sell you a package with a halal meal option checked off and call it done.
We don’t work that way. When a family books Turkey through Zaviamo, we already know which restaurants in Istanbul’s Fatih district are halal-certified, which ones are good, and which ones are “halal by assumption.” Rahat’s network and our team’s direct experience in destination means we’re not guessing. We’re telling you from having been there.
That’s not the forum’s job. That’s ours.
Plan your Turkey trip with Zaviamo!!!
The Investment Panels Were Honest About One Thing
Panel 1, Day One: Investment and Partnerships in Sustainable Tourism.
The conversation kept circling back to one truth. Pakistan has extraordinary destinations. Hunza. Skardu. Swat. The coastline. The heritage sites. And zero consistent infrastructure to turn those destinations into repeatable, high-quality experiences for foreign visitors.
That’s not a tourism problem. That’s an investment and governance problem.
What it means for you as a traveler is this: if you’re planning a domestic Pakistan trip expecting the level of service that, say, Azerbaijan’s tourism board has built, you’ll be disappointed. Azerbaijan sent their CEO to this very forum. They’ve spent years building what Pakistan is only now describing in panels.
Turkey has done it. Malaysia has done it. Indonesia is doing it.
Pakistan is still in the panel stage.
Which is fine. But it’s important to be honest about it.
If you’re a family wanting a structured, well-supported trip with vetted accommodation, halal food confirmed in advance, and someone reachable at 11pm when your Baku hotel switches rooms without notice, you’re not getting that from most of what’s being built right now in Pakistan’s outbound or inbound tourism space.
That’s why Zaviamo focuses on destinations where our team has direct, on-the-ground experience. Turkey. Azerbaijan. Malaysia. Indonesia. Sri Lanka. UAE. We don’t pretend to know a destination we haven’t been inside of.
Explore Zaviamo’s active destinations
The Technology Panel and What AI Actually Means for Travel Planning
Panel 4 on Day Two: Transformation of Tourism through Technology and Artificial Intelligence.
I want to be clear about something.
AI is not going to plan your trip. Not the good parts, anyway.
AI can scrape hotel prices. It can generate itinerary templates. It can write descriptions of places it’s never been to. It’s genuinely useful for certain things.
What it can’t do is call a Cappadocia hotel at 8pm Karachi time and confirm your cave suite is actually ready, not just “available.” It can’t tell you which airport transfer company in Baku runs late and which one is actually reliable. It can’t judge whether the “family-friendly” tag on a Malaysia resort means the pool is clean and safe or just that there are children around.
Ali started Zaviamo because of a trip where technology and packages both failed at the same time.
The Turkey trip where the agency refused to add an extra night in Cappadocia because “the package doesn’t allow that.” Where they couldn’t name a single halal restaurant in the city we were staying in. Where they stopped answering messages after 7pm. Where the hotel changed without any notice.
Technology didn’t fix that. A different package with better AI wouldn’t have fixed it either.
The fix was building a different model.
That’s what Zaviamo is. The fix.
Communities First: What the Climate Workshop Said About Responsible Travel
Workshop 2 was titled Communities First: Impact of Natural Calamities and Climate Change on Tourism.
This matters more than it sounds.
The 2022 Pakistan floods didn’t just destroy communities. They destroyed tourism infrastructure that had taken years to build. Swat Valley. Parts of Gilgit-Baltistan. Coastal areas.
Responsible tourism, the kind the forum spends two days discussing, is not just about carbon footprints and eco-lodges. It’s about building trips that don’t collapse when a region has a bad season. It’s about spreading traveler attention across a destination instead of piling everyone into the same three spots.
A custom trip does this naturally. You’re not being funneled into a package that sends 200 Karachi families to the same Bali hotel in the same week because that’s where the agency gets the best commission.
Your trip is built around you. Which spreads differently. Spends differently. Helps the destination differently.
Start building your custom Indonesia trip!
What Does the Sustainable Tourism Forum & Expo Mean for Travel in 2026 and Beyond?
Honest answer: it depends on whether anything moves from conversation to execution.
The forum had the right people in the room. The Secretary General of ICCD. The Managing Director of Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation. The CEO of the Azerbaijan Tourism Board. Speakers from Indonesia, Turkey, Iran, and beyond.
That’s not small. These are the people who move budgets and sign agreements.
If even a portion of what was discussed about halal tourism infrastructure, sustainable destination management, and private sector investment lands in actual policy and partnership, Pakistan’s tourism position inside OIC countries shifts.
But that takes years.
What you can do right now is make sure your next trip isn’t built on the old model.
Don’t buy a package that was designed for everyone and modified for no one. Don’t settle for an agency that stops answering after office hours. Don’t accept “the package doesn’t allow that” as an answer when all you’re asking for is one extra night somewhere your family actually wants to be.
The forum is building the future of tourism in Pakistan. We’re building your trip, the one that’s happening now.
Why I Attended This Forum as a Travel Agency Founder (Not a Government Official)
Most people in that room represented organizations. Chambers of commerce. Government bodies. Tourism boards.
I was there as the person who has to translate what these panels discuss into something a family in Karachi actually experiences.
Ali started Zaviamo after getting burned by a package. Not by a bad agency specifically. By the model itself.
The Cappadocia ask. The halal restaurant shrug. The hotel switch nobody mentioned. The unreachable agency after 7pm. The conversation with Rahat where she said, with complete calm, “They’re not in the travel business. They’re in the reselling business.”
That conversation is what the Sustainable Tourism Forum is, in a sense, trying to fix at scale. Better investment. Better infrastructure. Better halal tourism support. Better technology.
Zaviamo is fixing it one family at a time.
One custom trip, built from scratch, with someone on WhatsApp at 11pm if you need them.
What the Forum Revealed About Halal Tourism’s Real Gap
The word “halal” in tourism gets used the same way “all-inclusive” does in Pakistani travel. It becomes a checkbox. A label. A filter in a booking platform.
That’s not halal tourism.
Real halal tourism, the kind Workshop 3 was pushing toward, means a Muslim family can travel to Turkey or Malaysia or Indonesia and not have to spend the first three hours Googling which restaurant is safe to eat at.
It means hotel breakfast that doesn’t require label-reading as a morning ritual.
It means an agency that already knows, before you ask, where the nearest masjid is from your hotel.
It means someone who doesn’t treat the prayer-time question like it’s an inconvenience.
That’s not complex. It’s just specific. And specificity is exactly what a package can’t deliver.
Zaviamo’s Malaysia trips are built around halal-confirmed restaurants, Muslim-friendly resorts, and logistics that account for prayer times in the itinerary. Not as an afterthought. As a design principle.
That’s the difference between attending a panel about halal tourism and actually running one.
See how Zaviamo builds Malaysia trips!!
FAQ: Sustainable Tourism Forum & Expo 2026
What is the Sustainable Tourism Forum & Expo?
The Sustainable Tourism Forum & Expo is an annual event organized by the Islamic Chamber of Commerce and Development (ICCD), an affiliate of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The 2nd edition was held on January 21 and 22, 2026, at PC Hotel in Karachi. It brings together tourism leaders, government officials, private sector investors, and experts from OIC member countries to discuss sustainable travel, halal tourism, investment partnerships, and technology in tourism.
What topics were covered at the 2026 Sustainable Tourism Forum?
The 2026 forum covered investment and partnerships in sustainable tourism, medical tourism, heritage management for cultural sites and museums, halal tourism for Muslim travelers, private sector investment in tourism for economic development, tourism through technology and AI, sustainable destination management, and the impact of climate change on tourism.
What is halal tourism and why does it matter for Pakistani travelers?
Halal tourism means travel infrastructure, services, and itineraries designed specifically for Muslim travelers. This includes halal-certified food options, prayer facilities near hotels, alcohol-free environments, and modest tourism settings. For Pakistani families, halal tourism matters because most standard travel packages don’t account for these needs, leaving travelers to figure things out on the ground, often after they’ve already paid for and committed to a trip.
What is the difference between a package holiday and a custom trip for a Muslim family?
A package holiday is built once and sold repeatedly. It’s designed for general audiences, not for a specific family’s dietary needs, pace, religious requirements, or preferences. A custom trip is built from scratch around your family: your budget, your children’s needs, your halal food requirements, your schedule, your choice of destinations. Packages can’t flex. Custom trips are built to.
How does Zaviamo connect to sustainable tourism?
Zaviamo builds custom trips, not packages. Every trip is planned around the specific family booking it, which is the core principle sustainable tourism keeps trying to push mainstream travel toward. Zaviamo works across Turkey, Azerbaijan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, UAE, and more, with halal restaurant knowledge, vetted hotels, and direct founder contact built into every trip.
Your first custom quote is free. Message us on WhatsApp. We respond within 30 minutes.