Rama in Davos for tourist Albania: We've engaged architects from around the world for projects that you don't find in our region.

Record figures of foreign visitors to Albania have taken an important part of Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama's speech at the World Economic Forum table with the “Way we will travel”.

Viewing <x0).>urism as the battle horse”, it underlined that the tourism sector has generated 3.8 billion euros in just the first nine months of 2024.

According to him, Albania has welcomed 11.7 million foreign visitors, a 15 percent increase compared to 2023.

Before we recovered this success in tourism, we had the challenge of preserving it by building what we need. It's a very big challenge because Albania has incredible villages and extraordinary diversity and we have to have more investments, so we try to balance this. It's a big issue.

Last year we closed nearly 12 million tourists in a country that has 2.8 ml. The airport has seen an extraordinary increase in traffic, opening a new one in Vlora. Tourism for us is a new industry that we are building and from which we are seeing tremendous development from the opening of our mountains for tourists who want to climb, or with proposals like Jared Kouchner to build and develop to one of the largest Middle East companies that is building a tourist port. So there's no way we can undermine tourism, that's our battle horse.”, Rama said.

He also stopped by the challenges facing Albanian tourism, saying the government is doing everything possible to preserve nature's diversity.

“As we now face the challenge of maintaining our balance and trying not to lose what we need to guard by building up what we need. It's a very big challenge, because Albania has a wonderful beauty, an incredible variety and we need to have more investments in the meantime.”, he added.

The prime minister stressed that to accomplish this “Albania has engaged many extraordinary international architects to help us have different quality projects from what we have seen in the region around us”.

“We're trying to do our best, on the one hand, by increasing protected areas and creating more tools to transform what is protected into a source of development, and on the other hand by engaging great international architects to have a different quality of projects than we have seen in the region around us.”, Rama further said.