Kosovo Is Appealing to Foreign Tourists – Adequate Strategy to Attract Visitors is Needed

03/12/2015

 

Organized by the UBT and the Austrian-Kosovo Society, a conference “Austrian-Kosovar Day of Tourism Strategy 2015” was held at the UBT today, at which tourism experts discussed the actual situation in the field of tourism in our country and the strategy for 2016.

 

Larissa Olenicoff is from California and is coordinator at the Center of Tourism, Economy, and Innovation at the UBT.  She has different blogs and has visited many places of Kosovo and the region. She posts photos on the social networks so that people from all over the world can see what places Kosovo has.

 

In her presentation, Mrs. Olenicoff focused on the need to have professional education of the people dealing with tourism.  “We cannot have tourism without qualified people in these fields.  My suggestion with regard to the development of economy is to cutting down the VAT to 10 percent,” she said, adding that the UBT had helped and could do even more in developing the tourism strategy.

 

“I love Kosovo very much because it has very good things and even the diaspora people are not aware of those places,” she said, advising that tourism was a product that needed to be presented in an adequate way.

 

Speaking at the conference, Architect Florina Jerliu, focused on the big opportunities that the city of Pristina offers in the field of tourism.  She said besides being the capital city of Kosovo, Pristina is also attractive for other aspects; therefore, she said, whoever comes to Kosovo choses Pristina to visit.

 

She spoke in particular about the city center, its outskirts, and the surrounding localities with traces of ancient history, mines, religious sites, old and traditional houses, and many other things that can be explored.  Mrs. Jerliu presented a number of ideas as to how the heritage cites and all attractive objects could be protected in order to be shown to the foreign visitors in the best light.

 

Remzi Ejupi, director of the Eurokoha Company, criticized the Kosovar approach to the tourism and the economic development in general, saying that the major problem in this respect was the lack of a vision, concepts, ideas, and strategies.

 

He advised that based on the statistical date, there was quite some interest of the foreigners to visit our country, but they come here more for business than tourism purposes.  According to him, the most frequent visitors to Kosovo are those from Albania, Germany, Italy, and some other countries.

 

Mr. Ejupi drew a parallel of foreign visitors’ interest between Kosovo and Macedonia, both of them sea-locked countries.  Owing to a different strategy and approach to tourists, he noted that in the period January-July, as many as 500.000 foreigners stayed in the hotels and other touristic lodgings in Macedonia, while in Kosovo less than 100.000 stay in Kosovo for one whole year.

 

Ejupi noted that Kosovo should use the opportunities that its mountain tourism offers, because there are many places in Kosovo that can be attractive to the foreign visitors.

 

Gunther Dress, a tourism expert from Germany, noted among others that it was not important to only have interesting places and monuments, but rather to show interest in protecting them duly so that they could attract foreign tourists. 

 

He spoke about his experiences from the visits in Kosovo and other countries of the region, highlighting the element of hospitality of the people, which is one of the very important factors for the development of tourism.  Mr. Dress said all kinds of tourism could be attractive for the foreigners, including cultural tourism, mountain tourism, cycling, different events and so on.