Il turismo presente e futuro in Albania: statistiche e previsioni

Now, after so many years of incubation waiting for the right moment, tourist Albania has come to light, growing rapidly, and soon it will be adult and able to assert its presence in the world. In this brief overview, we study the statistics relating to foreign and domestic tourists in Albania in the 2013-2018 period, provided by INSTAT (the National Statistical Institute of Tirana), evaluating short-term dynamics, resulting framework and, despite the necessary precautions, presumable future dynamics. Some results of great interest: in the observed period, the inflows of foreign citizens arriving in Albania amounted to about 25-26 million units, or, on average, over 5 million people every year: and bear in mind that the population Albanian resident is around 3 million inhabitants (2 876 591 in 2015). In this period, inflows of foreign citizens tended to grow on average 12.0% a year until 2017, but in 2018 there was a record increase of over 16% on an annual basis. Some analyst fears that this record would have resulted, in 2019, in a sizeable downsizing of tourist arrivals, but in the first six months of the new year alone, over 2.1 million tourists were registered (630 thousand just in June), with an increase of more than 11% compared to the same period of 2018. Although tourism from Kosovo is clearly the majority (in general, between 25% and 35% of total foreign tourism), there are large representations of all the neighboring countries, Macedonia, Greece and Italy in the lead, but also of countries far more distant, such as Poland, whose citizens reported the largest annual increase (+34%, over 150 thousand tourists), as did Switzerland, but in this case with around 20 thousand visitors. Despite that advanced forecasting techniques cannot be applied to the available data, it is clear that the future dynamics of foreign tourism in Albania should be largely positive.