Tourism Needs Better Planing

Tourism involving sand and beach is a chicken and egg proposition when it comes to development. If you leave the area entirely undeveloped, it remains pristine and very desirable by tourists but it doesn’t offer the infrastructure to support them. However, if you develop too much, or develop without a plan and standards, you risk driving tourists away.
This is the scenario being played in Albania’s beaches this summer. Albania has a nice lengthy coastline for a country its size, and for a long time, one of the selling points was that much of it was pristine natural beauty. While there is some of that left, much of the coastline which is accessible by good roads has gone through a development binge, often building without a supporting infrastructure in place.
The results are evident in the eyes of regular tourists and the latest report by Albania’s heath authorities.
The latest report reveals that many of the most popular beaches have such high bacterial loads in the water and sand, they probably need to be shut down.
The main reason, the report says, is the fact that hotels and restaurants are built in areas where their only solution is to dump raw sewage in the sea. That’s right, it’s like dumping raw sewage in back yard, and inviting guests to enjoy the garden.
The transformation of the tourist areas, while bringing new infrastructure and more services has also left a bad taste in many areas.
The old Durres Beach has become the site of so many high-rise apartment blocks that it can no longer really be considered a traditional beach. It’s a new city’s waterfront. Other seaside areas around the country have been built on too, often without any proper plans or permits in place.
It is not that business owners simply don’t want to get the permits and go ahead and construct anyway. In Albania’s maze of property rights and bureaucratic processes it is often impossible to do things by the book. So the option faced by by many is either to develop improperly or not develop at all. The latter would be a better option but economic pressures lead to the current reality.
Another way to drive tourists away – have clubs blare out loud music until 3 a.m., which unfortunately has been a problem that has affected the quality of life for many tourists in Albania over the past few years.
In the middle of all these negative trends, we don’t want to be too gloomy.
Back in the 1990s, when people witnessed the destruction of most green spaces in Albania’s cities, it must have seemed pretty grim too. But the shanty-town-like entertainment complexes and coffee shops built on places like Rinia Park in downtown Tirana went down, and now residents enjoy their parks again. What has been done, can be undone, mostly.
However, the damage to the image of the country and it’s tourism industry can last a lot longer. Both businesses and the government need to work together to make sure development is done properly – with a plan. They need to offer the infrastructure to support tourism, but not destroy the environment on which tourism is built.