Green and tropical with miles of white sandy beaches, Ivory Coast was once West Africa's show piece as it thrived on cocoa exports and became a popular tourist destination, especially for citizens of former colonial master France.

But a 2002-3 war left the top cocoa grower divided, with the north controlled by rebels. Elections meant to end the conflict and reunite the country are scheduled for October 31, but have been delayed multiple times in the past.

Violent anti-French protests in late 2004, after a row between President Laurent Gbagbo and a French peacekeeping force, scared off thousands of expatriates and led foreign ministries everywhere to put travel warnings on Ivory Coast.

"Clearly the crisis has had an impact on tourism and even just numbers of visitors here," Tourism Minister Sidiki Konate told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of a conference to relaunch tourism at a lagoon-side hotel.

"But the elections will enable us to retake our rightful place. We are prepared to receive 2-3 million tourists."

Konate said the country gets at least 500,000 tourist visitors annually now, but ministry officials say those figures include people coming from around the region to visit relatives, with only 250,000 of that total arriving by air, and only a fraction of those are high-spending Western tourists.

The country currently makes around 100 billion CFA francs a year from tourism, they said.

 Contrast Kenya, whose famed safari parks with big game like lions and elephants tend to draw a million mostly Western tourists a year by air and netted it $800 million in 2007.

Despite its importance as an economic hub, airport officials say Ivory Coast receives two thirds of the air passengers of Senegal or Ghana, both smaller economies.

Tourism is a tiny part of Ivory Coast's economy when compared with cocoa, oil or other commodities, but Konate said the ministry had drawn up a strategy to change that.

"We will take measures to attract investment in tourism and create tourist zones with massively reduced taxation," he said, adding that visas would be made easier and funds would be freed up for tourism and hospitality training.

Another hurdle is Ivory Coast's ailing national parks, which have become overrun with militia groups, poachers, loggers and illegal cocoa farmers.

"During wartime, we concentrated only on security. Now we can liberate the parks from negligence," Konate said.