Sustainable tours, connecting tour guides with nature and communities.
Green Tirana is preparing and offer tailored tours and activities in and around Tirana which provide a unique travel experience for tourists in a sustainable way, that help communities to be economically developed and preserve their traditions, especially in unknown areas around Tirana, while educating tourists to be more responsible towards environment and local culture and offering training in the field of sustainability.
Local
Albania
Municipality of Tirana, the city and the rural area, villages around Tirana
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
2022-01-10
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): DMO Albania Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Eva Last name of representative: Kushova Gender: Female Nationality: Albania If relevant, please select your other nationality: Albania Function: Director Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Rr. Gogo Nushi, Nd 18, Shk 5, Nr 2 Town: Tirana Postal code: 1015 Country: Albania Direct Tel:+355 69 207 8552 E-mail:info@greentirana.com Website:https://greentirana.com/
Green Tirana came up as an idea in April 2022, by two persons Eva Kushova, expert of sustainable tourism and director of Dmo Albania and Lea Lohmueller, a sustainable tourism student who came to work as intern at DMO Albania from March to August 2021. DMO Albania is a destination marketing organisation, who owns Visit Tirana, www.visit-tirana.com, the tourism official information platform of Albanian Capital. Tirana is a very dense city, where half of population of all the country is concentrated. The city is still under construction, where many small old buildings are replaced with new skyscrapers. We started to think what to do to preserve somehow culture and tradition, how to link rural green areas with tourism, how to link together tourism, nature and rural communities. We decided firstly to interview and trained some passionate tour guides who wanted to work with us with this idea. Then we started to create our website and our tours, walking tours with focus on history and old buildings, experiences such as embroidery, olive oil tours, bike tours around the lake and rural tours. We managed to create unique itineraries, where tour guides were trained also not only to head the tours, but also to talk about protecting the city, nature and environment. We have managed to test our tours, especially bike tours and experience tours which are the most preferred by tourists. We are happy that we are contributing somehow to minimize the negative impact in the environment through our tours, reducing the using of cars, favoring the bikes and walks, removing plastics, advising tourists only to take reused bottles with water, advising them how to behave to respect the traditions of communities etc. We are still working to create more rural tours, since Tirana has many villages and we really want to include all of them in our itineraries, to help communities profit from tourists, while helping them to preserve the nature and traditions.
Create sustainable itineraries, tours with the aim to protect #environment and preserve culture and tradition
Involve small businesses and #ruralcomunities in the itineraries
Educate tour guides with #sustainabletourism criteria, so they can educate #responsibletourists
Help rural communities how to preserve their nature and tradition, how to improve their capacities for tourists
Raise awareness and promoting sustainable tourism practices in Albania
The key objectives of our project are:
To raise awareness for sustainable tourism in Tirana and all over Albania
To create green tours and green practices so they can be replicated in other areas
To educate tour guides with sustainable tourism criteria by GSTC (Gstccouncil.org), since the tour guides are in direct contact with tourists and businesses and communities.
To create unique itineraries minimizing the negative impact on environment and maximizing profits for small businesses and communities
How have we achieved these objectives? We have completed the itineraries very carefully, mentioning the sustainable criteria each of tour fulfil. We promote these tours, so tourists can read carefully what the tour offers and how they can cooperate with us to respect all the details, the nature, reducing pollution and respect the tradition. We organized a number of bike tours around the city, implementing all the criteria we mentioned in the tour in the website. The tourists were very cooperative and understandable to follow all the criteria and rules set by guide in the start of the tour. Also, we organized some tailored tours for olive oil experience and embroidery, where tourists in a slow way sat down with artisans and learned how to prepare the bottle with olive oil and herbs, also how to create a handmade embroided handkerchief and paying the artisans for all this mastery.
This project is still under implementation, we are testing rural tours, even though we still have to create new itineraries in the different areas. We are also trying to create a sustainable office, saving energy and water, reducing printing, growing plants etc.
There are a number of initiatives in Albania, but Green Tirana is the one and only trying to create sustainable tours with the focus in education and helping small businesses and communities to profit from tourism. We understand what sustainable tourism is, and we are among few people trained in this field.
The objective of our project was to educate people in communities how to be proud of their tradition, nature, and how to protect it. Also, we help them how to profit from what they already have, without changing their tradition. For example, we have created small tours like coffee experience, we have identified some old houses where owners can serve the coffee like in old traditions. Tourists pay for this tour, so they enjoy the storytelling also the owner's profit something. They are happy to welcome tourists and to serve them. Or embroidery experience which is an experience we created with some artisans in the area. Tourists go there, listen to the old ways of this mastery, and they can do something themselves, embroiding the initials of their name, and take this as a gift. Artisans are so happy to profit something from tourists, so they can preserve this mastery and even transmit to next generations. For the tours in rural area, we have listed in our itinerary, small businesses combining the tour with hiking and stops to families, where tourists can drink something and pay the families for this. Our tour guides educate tourists how to respect all these traditions, to respect nature and from the other hand ask communities or small businesses to keep clean their surroundings so we can continuously bring tourists. There are many tour operators around Tirana, doing tours, but we combine our tours with education of both sides, tourists, and small businesses or communities. We don't mention sustainable criteria when we speak with people, but we ask for simple things, which in fact are criteria of sustainable tourism.
With our project we are trying to promote sustainable tourism, which means a tourism that minimize impact in the environment and maximize the profits for all communities, so our focus are not big tourism businesses around Tirana, but small and medium business, artisans, also communities and rural areas. We try to include in our itineraries people or businesses who love their city, their village, who want to stay there and are passionate about tradition and want to preserve it. The tours are affordable for all. We urge using the buses or bikes instead of cars, we stay at local people homes not luxury hotels. The tours are for all, domestic or foreign tourists. All the tours from other tour operators are using cars, also they don't have any education mission in their tour operation, but are focused only in profiting money. While our tours are with affordable prices, for all, guaranteeing all year tourism not only seasonal, because the houses of people are opening all the year not just like hotels, who are opened seasonally. These are the reasons why our initiative and our project is exemplary.
Citizens are benefiting from this project in two ways: Firstly we promote a cleaner environment, our tradition and cultural identity. All citizens are profiting from a cleaner environment, less cars, more bicycles. from the other hand citizens are profiting from tourism, not only tourism businesses in the city, hotels and restaurants, but also artisans and rural community. Green Tirana started with small tours but we have felt the impact at happy artisans, happy rural businesses who are thanking us for involving in these tours.
We have worked with Tirana Municipality before we launched our initiative. We organized a social media contest and a photo festival with the theme: Green Tirana. We have taken a lot of submissions of photos and videos from Green Tirana. We also awarded the best photos with prizes supported by Tirana Municipality. Many young people travelled all over Tirana and photographed the places, the parks, lakes, mountains, and participated in this contest. We now are in discussion with municipality of Tirana, to take a pilot area, a village and to implement there all the criteria of sustainable tourism, and compete for Green Destination 100 top stories. We have choosen the area in Tirana and work with Municipality of Tirana through our project Green Tirana.
We want to work for a better and greener country through developing sustainable tourism. Tour guides are our missioners who will spread and implement slowly and everywhere they go, the sustainable tourism criteria. We are training tour guides, since two our experts are already trained by GSTC, so we are spreading our knowledge to others, to tourists so they can be more responsible while visiting our country, but also educating tourism businesses and communities what to do to protect what they have precious, and how to offer better services to tourists, while preserving the tradition and nature.
We are testing now more than 10 tours around Tirana, all based on sustainable criteria. We have reached to more than 30 businesses through our itineraries, who now are working with us and are employing more people. The first tours were organized from September to November, and now we are preparing new tours which will start in Springtime. We have trained 10 tour guides with sustainable tourism criteria. We are very hopeful that this process is unique and will be followed by many other tour operators in the country.
This is the first time that specific tailored tours are created based on Sustainable Tourism Criteria. Albania is a beautiful place but when it comes to protecting environment it has many problems. Our innovation is that we are trying to implement sustainable tourism criteria, which are linked to Sustainable development goals 2030, in new itineraries and tours we are organizing in the city of Tirana. This has two aims: education and raising awareness how we should do tourism, but in the other hand also helping communities to profit from Tourism.
We initially saw all the sustainable tourism practices in greenest destinations, such as Denmark, Sllovenia, Finland, Switzerland, etc. Than we started to think how we should do our work to start talking about sustainable tourism. We decided to create a website, as an online platform to write and promote sustainable tourism. But then we thought that we could do more, to create some tours, some practices and itineraries as example, not just speaking for sustainable tourism as a theory. To create itineraries we started to interview tour guides, select the ones who wanted to be trained for sustainable tourism. After training we worked with them with some itineraries, who are the most required by tourists, cultural tours, experiences in Tirana, bike tours etc. After we created tours, we added to each of them sustainable criteria that they fulfill, and then we created a number of tours in 4 categories: walking tours, bike tours, experiences and rural tours. we communicated with artisans, tourism business, bike rental providers etc so we can engage them in those itineraries, and offer them the possibilities to make profits from this cooperation. We also are promoting in this website all greener areas of Tirana. We are also offering continuous training for sustainable tourism for tour guides. we integrated a booking platform for the tours and start promoting them at Visit Tirana, which is our main tourism platform very popular in Instagram and Facebook.
We really hope that these kinds of tours will be replicated in other areas, by other tour operators. Tour guides are freelancers, so they can work for different tour operators and transmit their knowledge about sustainability in other companies. From the other hand, the tourism businesses that we are including in our itineraries are spreading the word, so many other tourism businesses want to be part of the tours. We have promised to tourism businesses that if they keep and fulfill some of our requirements, such as reducing plastics, saving water, trying to implement some ways to save energy, using more bikes, working with recycling materials, etc we will produce a green label #GreenTirana, who will be distributed to all the tourism businesses we will include in our itineraries. They want to be part of these tours, because they want to profit from tourism, from the other hand we want them to fulfill some criteria. it is a win win situation for everyone. At the end the winner is our place, our country who will be cleaner and greener, but most of all will profit Albanian people, who will be healthier, and their economic situation will be more sustainable.
We contribute for a better planet, through sustainable tourism. all the criteria of sustainable tourism are linked with 17 sustainable goals of SDG2030.
Protecting culture, tradition, environment, are improving the situation in local context, are minimizing the negative impact in environment and are increasing the sustainability of economic and social situation for people living in Albania through developing sustainable tourism.
