TIRANA, April 25 – One of Albania’s biggest construction companies has teamed up with a Spanish hotel chain to build one of the country’s biggest tourist resorts that is expected to trigger about Euro 90 million in investment and create some 500 jobs.
The resort is being built on a 35 hectare area at the Lalzit Bay, only about 30 km from Tirana and the country’s sole international airport.
The accommodation unit, a joint investment by Albania’s Edilal and Spain’s Melia Hotels Internationals has been designed as a 5-star resort, hotel and tourist village with different kinds of villas and three-storey buildings.
Speaking at a ceremony marking the start of the construction works this week, Prime Minister Edi Rama described the investment as good news for the country’s emerging tourism industry.
“The arrival of “Melia Hotels International” is more than welcome news, as it breaks the ice after many years and paves the way for high quality tourism and other 5-star accommodation units to be built in Albania,” said Prime Minister Rama.
Investment in tourism resorts has recently revived by offering investors state property in priority areas for a symbolic 1 Euro for up to 99 years in return for investment and job creation.
Several other investments, mainly by Albanian construction companies, are being made in luxury tourist resorts along the country’s Adriatic and Ionian coastline to meet rising international and domestic demand.
However, the long standing issue of unclear property rights has been one of the main barriers in attracting foreign investors, especially in the tourism sector.
In September 2016, violence against an American executive apparently related to property rights led to a Dubai-based company withdrawing from a major tourist resort investment worth $450 million that was supposed to create 1,200 jobs by 2018 at the Gjiri i Lalzit Bay.
The tourism industry has been one of the country’s fastest growing in the past few years, attracting more than 4 million tourists and generating about €1.5 billion, about 8.4 percent of the country’s GDP. The travel and tourism industry directly supported 85,000 jobs in 2016 but the sector’s total contribution to employment including wider effects from investment, the supply chain and induced income impacts in 2016 was 267,000 jobs or about 24 percent of the country’s total employment, according to a report by London-based World Travel & Tourism Council, WTTC.
Closed to tourists for about five decades until the early 1990s, Albania offers a miscellaneous picture of coastal and mountain tourism and has been attracting more and more foreign tourists in the past decade being nicknamed as “A new Mediterranean love” and “Europe’s last secret.”
