![Overhead of people on beach with sun umbrellas, Saranda, Vlore, Albania](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2023/06/15/TELEMMGLPICT000339445942_16868473692490_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Why millions of British holidaymakers could soon be flocking to Albania
Cheap, and with 296 miles of sandy shoreline, this overlooked country is growing in popularity – and a new airport could be the game-changer
![Overhead of people on beach with sun umbrellas, Saranda, Vlore, Albania](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2023/06/15/TELEMMGLPICT000339445942_16868473692490_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
It is not entirely unusual for two rival airlines to announce competing flights to the same destination at roughly the same time. The aviation industry has rebounded strongly from the pandemic and, as passenger numbers head back towards where they were before the world crashed at the start of 2020, new route launches are a relatively regular occurrence.
What is unusual is for the destination in question to be Tirana. And yet, remarkably, twice in the last week, low-cost carriers have declared their intentions to fly there from the UK.
Ryanair will introduce connections from Stansted, Manchester and Edinburgh on October 31. And Wizz Air will supply similar contrails, with services from Liverpool, Birmingham and Edinburgh commencing on December 19 – a fresh trilogy to supplement the route from its main British hub, Luton, which the budget airline began flying in 2018.
![Ryanair will introduce connections from Stansted, Manchester and Edinburgh on October 31](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2023/06/15/TELEMMGLPICT000339446019_16868473354690_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
A decade ago, this scenario would have seemed preposterous. If no longer quite regarded as the Iron Curtain relic of yore – it was the final country in central Europe to cast off communism’s yoke, in 1992 – Albania was certainly seen as a niche place for tourists. As recently as 2017, the only flight from the UK was a British Airways link to Tirana from Gatwick. By the time those extra Wizz Air routes are operational at Christmas, there will be 11 options for travellers from this country, including BA (now flying from Heathrow), easyJet (Gatwick), and Albanian pairing Air Albania and Albawings (both from Stansted).
Slowly, the last blurry outpost of the European seafront is drifting into focus. In 2010, Albania greeted 1.28m international tourists. By 2019, that figure had almost tripled, to 3.3m. And if Covid brought an inevitable dip, even in 2021, the number was a solid 2.9m.
Why? With good reason. For all the occasional concrete remnants of Cold War froideur, Albania is the gap in the chain between the increasingly popular shores of Croatia and Montenegro, and the sunny reliability of Greece. It is a coastal jigsaw piece whose 296 miles of waterfront include stretches of both the Adriatic and the Ionian – the two seas meet on its watch, at the city of Vlore. For now, the biggest traveller demographic is the Italians, who flock to the beaches in the north of the country, at second-city Durres. Six of the 10 busiest flight routes into Tirana are from Italy. But the busiest link is to London. Last year, 463,451 passengers flew into the Albanian capital from its British counterpart.
![Restaurants and hotels by the beach in the village of Dhermia, located in the Albanian Riveria on the Ionian coast.](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2023/06/15/TELEMMGLPICT000339446016_16868473509470_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqKkzUGe8q7_A35DWV6BPUcd6nREIXFSXlMWnpS2XfpTI.jpeg?imwidth=350)
According to the Foreign Office, this translates to 120,000 British visitors per year. This is still a relatively small statistic – for comparison, 727,555 of us enjoyed a getaway to Croatia in 2022, while almost 4.5m Britons took a trip to Greece. But there is a growing interest in a country where sterling still has considerable purchasing power. At the current exchange rate, there are 127 Albanian leks to the pound – a distinctly happy comparison when you consider that the average price of a pint in Albania is roughly 200 leks (£1.58).
The number of British tourists would already be higher but for a variety of issues. One is that UK-based tour operators are yet to jump on the Albanian bandwagon. Beach-escape specialist Sunvil is something of an outlier, having featured the country in its brochure since 1996 – although, even with these three decades of experience, it only sells holidays to the south of the country, where Saranda gleams as Albania’s most enticing resort-city.
“Our Albanian programme is relatively small – just a cultural tour, and a handful of hotels in Saranda,” says the company’s Dudley der Parthog. “But there has been an increase in interest from prospective travellers of late, and we are planning to expand. Saranda has doubled in size since we started – and is now something of a tourist hub.”
![Albania, Tirana, Skanderbeg square, Etehem Bey mosque](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2023/06/15/TELEMMGLPICT000339445930_16868473898190_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
A second issue underpins the first. For the most part, the quality of accommodation in Albania still lags behind that in other countries. While you can find “boutique” hotels along its coast, many of the bigger properties – such as those at Durres – date to the first boom in post-communist construction, in the mid-Nineties. These are now showing their age. “Although tourism is growing fast, it is still fairly new, and there are rough edges compared to the service levels visitors now find in Greece and Spain,” der Parthog adds.
The third, biggest issue is one of access. All 11 of the current or imminent flight routes from the UK are to Tirana – a fascinating and increasingly vibrant city which wears its heritage and scars with pride, but one that, lying 20 miles inland, halfway up the country, is not wholly convenient for fly-and-flop tourists. A second international airport, Kukes, opened in April last year – but, almost on the border with Kosovo, is even less practical.
There will, though, be a third airport, at Vlore. This mega-project – which has not come without controversy, or damage to the Vjose-Narte wetland area around it – is due to be completed by next April. This will be a game-changer, dropping tourists right by the beach. At present, Sunvil is only able to offer holidays to Saranda by flying its customers to adjacent Corfu, and ferrying them across. With this complication in their way, no other package-tourism specialist dangles the Albanian coast in front of British holidaymakers. Tui only covers the country via a seven-night escorted history tour which crosses the border into North Macedonia; Thomas Cook goes no further than a clutch of hotels in Tirana. Jet2 limits its Albanian operation to a day-trip from Corfu; On The Beach offers nothing at all. Expect this picture to be radically different when Vlore is up and running.
![Close up of sliced flatbread on a serving wooden cutting board with handle, in a restaurant in Tirana, Albania](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2023/06/15/TELEMMGLPICT000339445925_16868474116090_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqgsaO8O78rhmZrDxTlQBjdLdu0TL-Cg_AMOUqySXmFgU.jpeg?imwidth=350)
This relative inaccessibility is of less importance to another type of holidaymaker – those who travel to Albania with history in mind. Here is another growing demographic, drawn to a country which thrived in the first millennium BC as Illyria, witnessed the ancient Greek and Roman centuries, and fell under the control of the Ottoman Empire. Each of these eras is thrillingly visible, at archaeological sites like Apollonia and Butrint, and in medieval towns such as the gorgeous Berat. In-depth itineraries tend to include all three.
“We’ve seen a sizeable increase in interest in Albania, fuelled largely by the perception of it as a value-for-money beach destination,” explains Andrea Godfrey of Regent Holidays.
This is not strictly on-brand. “We are not a not a traditional fly-and-flop operator,” says Godfrey of a company that has long-standing expertise in Balkan and east European travel, and has sold breaks to Albania since 1971. “But this has a halo effect for us. We’ve seen a 42 per cent increase in enquiries and a 62 per cent leap in bookings for Albania in the last year, from customers looking to explore its rich history and its beautiful scenery.”
So strong is this interest that Albania is the most popular Balkan destination with Regent clients, eclipsing the more feted Croatia. Godfrey is confident that this connection will only intensify as the country opens up further. “We are also seeing a younger clientele coming through, due to the popularity of Albania’s beach resorts on Instagram,” she says.