The Hotel and Tourism Vocational School in Tirana, where around 1000 students graduate in tourism management and food technology degree programs each year, has been recently built from scratch under a 272-million-lek funding allocated by the state budget. Prime Minister Edi Rama visited the newly built school, the largest school facility of its kind in the country.
“This is the project’s first phase. A former old school building, constructed back in 1959, used to be located at this site and it housed food technology laboratories. The old facility was torn down to make way for a two-storey new building featuring new school labs, also an Albanian government’s investment,” the Deputy Finance and Economy Minister Dajna Sorensen said.
“I used to visit this place earlier and I would say it was completely degraded,” Prime Minister Rama said.
The new investment project aims at increasing number of students attending this school and put an end to two-shift classes. The project’s second stage is set to kick off soon to expand the facility, add more classrooms, cabinets, additional areas and vocational training laboratories.
The students’ vocational training is organized in different hotels, most renowned bars and restaurants and tourist agencies in Tirana. Students attending the Hotel and Tourism School leave school with the degree of a hotel and tourism technologist, and the quality of their education enables them to actively pursue job careers in tourism industry. This applies primarily to jobs in hotels, tourist agencies and other similar companies.
“The school has established extraordinary fruitful cooperation with hotel and tourism businesses. We face a growing demand from tourism business operators, during the summer season in particular, and we often regret to turn them down for being unable to meet their demands. However, starting from September on, the new school will strengthen its capacities and we will hopefully better meet the labour market demands for skilled workers in tourism industry. We are also working to improve quality,” Sorensen said.
PM Rama said that this school’s specifics make it highly sought in an ever growing tourism market.
“The tourism schools in countries experiencing a tourism boom are highly sought and very important education institutions. Despite the situations that may occur, the number of foreign tourists visiting Albania keeps growing and official data show that number of foreign visitors in May is higher compared with the same period of the previous year. However, the tourism development needs skilled workers and managers,” he noted.
