By Kliton Gerxhani*
The tourism ministry has been promoting the 2018-2022 draft strategy on tourism. That is the fourth strategy so far after the 1993-2010, the 2002-2012 and the 2007-2013 tourism strategies.
Even if you know nothing about tourism development, but are good only at maths (and know something on chaos), considering the time frames of those strategies, one can understand that such papers are unfortunately produced not for the purpose they have, i.e. to determine the vision in the tourism sector, but to imply that “we also have a strategy.”
The first strategy pretended to lay the foundations for 17 years until 2010. But eight years before that strategy expired, Albania drafted a new strategy in 2002 for another ten years until 2012. Yet, five years before its expiry, in 2007 Albania drafted a shorter-term strategy, valid for only five years until 2013.
And running counter to the “tradition of destroying strategies,” Albania did the opposite thing about the fourth strategy, it let tourism develop without a strategy (of course on paper) for five consecutive years from 2013 to 2018! And since we waited for so long without a strategy, Albania decided to draft its last strategy for a shorter time, for only four years until 2022.
All that “timeline” reading of our tourism strategies would be enough to understand that drafting those strategies needs a real “strategy.” Because the strategies are drafted without a long-term vision and continuity, thinking that they will nevertheless never be implemented, without asking the main stakeholders in the tourism industry and often badly amending each other and by “learning on the job” and leaving this responsibility to whoever undertakes it.
At the end of the day, the sector has been in chaos for 25 years, with no standards, hotels with no star classification, unlicensed travel agencies and tour operators, tour guides with no certified curricula which they can qualify on and get tested periodically, tourist transportation which is even worse because nobody has dealt with it even though it is the riskiest part in the package holiday, without mentioning uninspected and uncategorized restaurants, cultural attractions that apply last-minute price hikes even though the package holidays have been booked months earlier, etc.
That is all a result because we haven’t started from scratch yet so that we could all sit down and decide about the vision of our tourism industry in the next 5 to 10 years so that we don’t escape Albania in July and August because there is not enough room even for us in our small country (which pretends to host 5 million tourists) and when we come back “find a void” this time because no foreigner visits us for 3 to four consecutive months during wintertime.
But that can be done when it is first determined about who will implement the strategy, what will the timelines on its implementation be, the penalties on failure to apply them as well as deciding on a budget for this strategy. Then, the main stakeholders are contacted to determine the vision.
If that is not done this way, at least save us the printing paper so that we don’t cause pollution to the environment.
*Kliton Gerxhani is the head of the Albanian Tour Operators Association
