Perspectives for sustainable tourism in Albania

The growing trend of tourism in Albania, if we remove the parenthesis on the pandemic, has registered a rapid surge in tourists in recent years and has highlighted a great potential that the sector has acquired, which will soon be able to assert its presence in the scenarios of the world tourism. In order to be able to compete for such a coveted position, it is necessary to follow the stages of sustainable tourism and what is the state of the art of the sector in an increasingly green and sustainable context towards the habitat that surrounds us. The proposed work highlights the efforts both in terms of policies implemented by the government for sustainable tourism and in terms of responses that have been given by the same structures in the sector in order to interact with tourism increasingly based on good practices regarding enhancement of the territory. We analyzed the data before the pandemic, period 2013-2019 with a perspective of territorial sustainability both for summer tourism and for cultural and religious tourism and even for health tourism, one of the new frontiers cleared in Albania. Starting from some tangible results, the influx of international tourists continued to grow on average by 12.0% per year until 2017 to reach a peak of over 16% on an annual basis in 2018, we want to highlight the impact of sustainable solutions to increase the added value to the tourism sector.