TIRANA, April 18 – Being too small to compete on their own and facing tough competition from already established European destinations, EU aspirant Western Balkans countries are considering offering joint package holidays to attract tourists from distant parts of the world.
The initiative came earlier this month at a regional tourism fair held in Tirana and is in line with the Berlin Process commitments of establishing a common regional market among the six EU aspirant Western Balkans countries.
Macedonian officials present at the Tirana fair, the first regional tourism showcase in the country, pushed for the creation of joint package holidays and the introduction of regional countries as a single tourist destination ahead of their participation in the major Japan travel fair by next September.
“Nobody from Asia especially Japan will come this far to the Balkans to visit a single country. They will come only if they visit the whole region offering joint package holidays with accommodation in the Albanian coastline and its UNESCO World Heritage sites, the Montenegro Mountains and the Serbia tourist attractions,” Lela Krstevska, the head of Macedonia’s Tourism Promotion Agency told Deutsche Welle in the local Albanian service.
“We are preparing to represent ourselves as a region in this year’s Tokyo tourism fair where Albania, Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina will represent their joint products as a common regional market,” she said.
The Western Balkans region already offers some hiking trails such as the ancient Via Egnatia linking Rome to Byzantium, present-day Istanbul crossing through Albania and Macedonia.
The Via Dinarica mountain hiking trail crossing through seven Western Balkans countries is another joint destination. The trek which stitches together ancient trading and military routes traversing the Dinaric Alps was rated by prestigious National Geographic as one of the best 2017 trips.
The Peaks of the Balkans, a 192 km cross border hiking trail which connects mountainous areas of Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro, is another opportunity that has been made available in the past few years.
However, with the current few joint tourism products only focused on mountain tourism and targeting hikers, the Western Balkans countries need to work a lot on developing joint packages that could attract tourists of all kinds and extend their geography of visitors.
“The Balkans has left behind war and is now in peace and safe having a unique opportunity to show the world an unexplored region which is thinking of joint development on its road to the EU,” says Albania’s Economy and Tourism Minister Milva Ekonomi.
“Thanks to the Berlin Process the whole region has been involved in what is known as the Balkans connectivity project where we target opening up our trade, road and energy borders to promote economic development. At last month’s Sarajevo Summit, Western Balkans countries signed a deal on the establishment of a common regional market also involving the tourism sector,” said Ekonomi.
“We target boosting cooperation to increase and diversify regional tourism products, introducing ourselves as a single market in the global tourism market,” she added.
Kosovo representatives at the Tirana Mediterranean travel fair said all regional countries need to boost cooperation and promotion to change the image of a region at war, known as Europe’s powder keg.
“We should not forget that the Western Balkans is still perceived like in the 1990 by tourists around the world. They think of the region still at war with no stability and security,” said Arber Muhaxhiri, a Kosovo tourism representative.
“It is high time we changed this image with joint tourism products. Travelling and watching the region for yourself, you can understand how distorted the image is when looking at these countries from the outside,” he added.
Tourism officials and travel agencies from Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro as well as EU members Italy and Greece, two of Europe’s most popular destinations, took part in Albania’s first Mediterranean tourism fair.
In late 2016, Albania and Serbian tourism officials also planned offering joint package holidays to attract tourists from new potential markets such as Russian-speaking countries and Asia.
Albania climbed eight places in the 2017 Travel and Tourism Competitiveness report to rank 98th among 136 global economies, making it as one of 15 destinations to have registered the biggest progress, but yet continued to lag behind some of its key regional competitors who have a longer tradition in the tourism industry, according to a report by Switzerland-based World Economic Forum.
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.
Ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro account for three-fifths of foreign tourists visiting Albania, with local experts often referring to this market as ‘patriotic tourism.’
The country boasts dozens of sandy and rocky beaches along its 476 km coastline stretching through the Adriatic and Ionian, the most famous of which are found on the Albanian Riviera south of the country.
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.”
Since 2014, the country has been marketing its travel destinations under the “Albania, go your own way” slogan.
