Prime Minister Edi Rama’s remarks at guesthouse owned by Naum Bici, one of the many private homes transformed into guesthouses or inexpensive hotel-like lodgings in the village of Lin, the lake town of Pogradec in southeastern Albania:

Thank you very much for your hospitality!

I am very pleased to come back here to see a concrete project this time as we have launched tourism projects in Lin for some time now, but an overall assessment of the whole area, its current state and tourism potential was needed in order to identify the needed interventions and identify at the same time the potential collaborators, who can unite their forces and achieve significant desired results.

Many might ask how comes that a large group of people visit the are just for a guesthouse? The reason is that we want to promote this business as a model and show through concrete examples how cooperation between a completely ordinary family and the government can work and how we together can develop something that otherwise would have been tough, if not impossible for a family with a modest budget that can own a private home and whose transformation into a guesthouse or agritourism business is completely possible.

What government does is that it aids this household by providing a conditional grant, not a loan, given that this family develops this project of such size and moves in this direction.

Once the government launched agritourism and guesthouses program, the European Union earmarked a considerable funding to support this initiative aimed at building guesthouses and agritourism businesses. Therefore, I would encourage everyone to follow the lead after seeing these initial success stories in this direction and apply for such projects.

Through collaboration with the Agency, the technical assistance and a kind of modest consultancy by the local government itself, this is a completely feasible project to turn a sleeping asset like a private home, when it is used as a family shelter, into a lucrative mechanism. A growing number of visitors are choosing to book such guesthouses for their vacations, just it is the case of this new guesthouse that is booked online. If this chain expands into the whole village, then it could well turn into a tourist resort owned not only by a single owner, but everyone becomes owner of his own house and earns his part of revenue. Then everyone should know for sure that not only the demand will keep steadily growing, but the current accommodation prices will also go up, although they are not cheap at all.

So, each and every one can apply and receive the government support. With the Albanian Development Fund we will carry out a series of interventions as part of the 100 Villages program to turn this village into a successful transformation model and certainly make it part of the transformation I believe will take place over the next four years under the newly elected Mayor of Pogradec, the lake town of Pogradec is a tourist destination that has been significantly damaged over the years of the country’s long transition and the whole area has tremendous tourist potential.

Here we have a great ally, that is the wonderful nature and the rich heritage of the area and we just need to coordinate our forces in to main directions; on one hand it is you who should build and develop in more agritourism business facilities and, on the other hand, is the government that will support projects to further develop infrastructure and every other attractive element of this village through the Albanian Development Fund.

Thank you very much!