Prime Minister Edi Rama’ remarks at meeting with international tour operators at Hilton Garden Inn:

Perhaps it is worth a comparison to speak about the tourism performance and expectations by point out Croatia’s example, a country with foreign tourist numbers four times higher than the number of foreign tourists visiting Albania, generating six times higher tourism revenue rates than Albania. However, most recently, Croatian newspapers surprisingly note that Albania is attracting our tourists.

Of course we are not attracting the Croatia-bound visitors, but yet it is a very significant fact that if Croatia tourism or in other countries like Croatia appears to be at a stalemate due to the exhaustion of potential, Albania has a huge untapped tourism potential and a clear indicator of this huge untapped potential is the fact that if number of foreign tourist in Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Bulgaria grew by less than 15%, the foreign tourist arrivals in Albania grew by around 30% in August and September. Today we looked at September tourist numbers and it was exactly these numbers we were discussing with some leading tour operators in the tourism industry for years now, who also confirmed that number of tourist arrivals in September grew more than ever before.

Growth in tourist number and tourism revenue is yet more significant if we are to consider the fact that a number of destinations are re-emerging in the tourism market although deemed somehow inappropriate, including Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia. However, having said all these, including the fact that the number of foreign tourists visiting Albania over the past five years has surged to over 6 million, up from around 3.4 million previously, and the tourism industry generated about 2 billion euros, up from around 1 billion generated previously, quite a significant reflection also in employment terms with over 30 000 people employed in the tourism industry during the high season only. The truth is that our tourism potential should double earlier rather than later and our challenge is to achieve the 10 million tourists target sooner rather than later.

I am not somewhat overoptimistic as Blendi Klosi (Tourism Minister) who sounds very optimistic in every word and every though coming to his mind, but however, I am confident we can achieve the goal of drawing 10 million inbound tourists annually in the next four or five years. Here today we are in a new reality of tourism and development of tourism industry in Albania, a new five-star hotel, while many others will become a reality in Tirana, of course not planned for next year, but in the signing contracts phase now to draw for the first time ever a number of renowned international five-star hotel brands. The discussions on these contracts are currently at an advanced stage with the Ministry of Tourism to develop investment projects in the coastal areas.

In addition to the permits issued in 2017 for construction of 53 new hotels, we still have to take stock of contracts signed in 2018, besides new projects on construction of Vlora and Kukes airports. Apart from the massive infrastructure projects and other positive aspects as part of the tourism development efforts in the country, and not tourism alone, I want to clearly state something as a kind of prologue to an event that we are organizing together with the Ministry of Tourism and our highly valued consultants from the Croatia’s Horwath group, which has contributed to over 50 countries with a significant impact on their tourism development, that we can no longer continue developing an Albanian-style tourism industry for Albanians in the sense of keeping on constructing the so-called tourist villages projected to be personal villages that can then be sold to other co-villagers, buildings surrounded by walls without taking care of what is lying around, or, in other words, we can no longer continue turning the country’s coastline into a Golem-like area.

Albania’s transition period saw two phenomena; the Bathore-like chaotic urbanization of the peripheral areas in the big cities due to a massive demographic movement and the Golem-like chaotic and illegal construction and occupation of land as a nightmare to move from the city to countryside and transit from a rich individual in the city in a villager in coastal tourist areas. These two phenomena should belong to the past. The country has a coastline with tremendous potential and Albania is the last undiscovered destination in the Mediterranean. An exponential growth of interest in Albania is related to the country’s stunning natural beauties, to aspects of the country’s pristine nature and if we are to continue the Golem-like chaos, in ten years from now, Albania will no longer be the country everyone wants to visit, but a country in which no foreign tourist will be interested in. It means we should definitely provide another development alternative. We will definitely provide an alternative to investors, but we should first put an end to the time of selling apartments and real estates of the city’s rich who all of a sudden became co-villagers and co-owners of properties on the seaside, while coastal investments should coincide with a great ambition to make Albania not just a country where many tourists come, but a country where tourism generates a lot more revenue and creates much more qualitative employment.

This is the challenge; to combine the existing beauty with the beauty we are building, and not destroy the existing beauty with the primitive and vulgar forms of development, which are part of a historical phase but in no way should we allow a project development by a group of villagers who own a higher number of beds than Croatia, that is to say, a neighbourhood of wealthy people but who don’t understand where this world’s good of the mind and spirit comes from.

Having said this, I want to express appreciation and congratulate all those who have provided maximum contribution in this transition phase of our tourism industry, and of course we are making preparations not to discourage, but quite the contrary to encourage and support investments in tourism. We are ready to support ambitious people and investors who are committed to ushering in a new era of building the chain of contributions for Albanian tourism, contributions that provide Albania the ambition to not destroy itself and not to close the door to the future by exploiting in a vulgar and barbaric way yet the untouched beauties of the past.

Thank you very much!