Greece & Albania to Tighten Cooperation in Tourism Sector
Authorities in Greece and Albania are looking forward to tightening cooperation in the field of tourism in order to promote destinations and increase the number of visitors between the two countries.
Such a decision comes following the meeting held in Greece’s capital, Athens, between the Greek National Tourism Organization (GNTO) President, Angela Gerekou, as well as Tourism and Environment Tourism Minister of Albania, Mirela Kumbaro, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.
According to a report provided by Greek Travel Pages, Albania’s Tourism Minister introduced actions taken to redefine its country’s contemporary tourism profile while she also unfolded new plans to team up with the Hellenic Republic for the common promotion of Albania and Greece.
At the same time, GNTO’s President, Gerekou, emphasized the importance of preserving the identity of both territories by focusing on culture as well as heritage tourism and by working together in order to organize actions that will help in the development of the tourism sector of both countries.
Considering Albania as an up-and-coming destination, Gerekou stressed that it was in a position to set from the start all the terms and conditions needed for a sustainable model for tourism development.
Before the spread of the Coronavirus and its new variants Albania accounted for the main source of markets for Northern Greece with travellers from Albania outnumbering all other nationalities in 2018 in three out of a total of 13 regions in Greece.
The figures provided by the Greek Travel Pages revealed that in 2018 the number of visits by Albanian travellers rose by 16.2 per cent, to a total of 1,121,472, while the number of travellers from Albania increased by 19 per cent in 2018, to a total of 986.6 thousand visitors against 828.7 thousand recorded in 2017.
Greece is among the European countries that managed to welcome a large number of international visitors even amid the pandemic during which period many countries imposed travel bans and other restrictions in an effort to contain the further spread of the virus and protect citizens’ lives.
Following the success that the tourism industry experienced last year, recently, Greece’s Tourism Minister, Vassilis Kikilias unfolded a new plan for this year.
Through an announcement made on November 18, the Minister of Tourism of Greece announced that Greek tourism revenues exceeded 18 billion euros for a period from January until November last year.
Kikilias considered Greece’s tourism sector among the leading tourism brands in countries worldwide.
