“It should have been a good place to stay, but… many things should change”. This is the first sentence of the long comment that Majoo from Blava, Slovakia, has made in the famous website Tripadvisor, about his experience in a hotel in Durres, in the Albanian sea coast. “The biggest problem is service and food. It has nothing to do with a four star hotel, believe it or not. The coffee that was served there was not worthy of a four star hotel!”, he continues with his confession of the negative impressions about the Albanian hotel where he spent 10 days… Which, in fact are not the only ones, because in this site, we can find many comments like this one. There are also people who consider the night spent in an Albanian hotel as the worst one ever spent, even if the hotel in question was a five star hotel. “The air conditioning in the room is old and it doesn’t work very well. So, the room was very hot and I couldn’t sleep all night. I think that there should have been decent air conditioning, as this was a five star hotel…”, Hellkar from Oslo, Norway, comments her stay in a hotel of the Albanian capital. All of these experiences and testimonies show that in spite of the efforts to modernize premises, but at the same time, of the service too, Albanian hotels still have problems with the true level of standards that they deliver. In other words, the stars that they claim that their hotels have do not match their standards.
It’s been a while that the state is trying to put an end to this situation through legislation and through the process of certification for hotels, under a new special regulation passed a year ago, but, which could not be realized even this year. Such thing is confirmed for Albanian Free Press by the head of the Albania’s Hotel and Lodging Association, Zak Topuzi. “The incentive that was launched came to a standstill due to some problems with bylaws that needed to be corrected. But the problem with the creation of the technocrat government and problems that the Socialist Movement for Integration and Socialist Party had between them, made it impossible for these bylaws to be approved. I believe that they will be approved in September, once the new government enters in office”, he says. Meanwhile, he adds that accommodating outlets cannot apply for certification, because the system has flaws and as such, the process has come to a standstill. On the other hand, as far as the standstill concerning the certification of Albanian hotels is concerned under the new regulation, the same thing is also confirmed by experts of the ministry of Economic Development and Tourism.
“The system of self-declaration has been set up. This system is very detailed and it requires three hours to be filled online. Even after the form is filled, an assessment team will inspect the premises and decide on the stars. This is where the process has come to a halt, because we had the elections and this could not be finalized”, they told Albanian Free Press. These is claimed by both sides, hotels and state institutions, meaning that even during this holiday season, tourists had the “chance” to stay in hotels with “missing” stars.
“None of the hotels is certified"
The stars that hotels in Albania have were allocated by the hotels themselves. This fact is confirmed for Albanian Free Press by one of the representatives and the official institution that oversees this private activity. “They have allocated the stars themselves and the test is done made by search engines such as booking.com. They usually make an assessment based on the criteria and the different complaints that the hotels’ customers make”, Zak Topuzi, the head of the Hotel and Lodging Association says.
Topuzi goes even further by saying that for the moment, our country has no accommodation outlet with stars and according to him, this has happened because the official date on their certification, made years ago, has expired. As far as the certification process is concerned, he offers a modest figure of 36, which are very little compared to 100 accommodation outlets which are said to be distributed around the country (formal, because hundreds of others are informal). “Only 36 hotels is the total number which is certified, but even for them, the certificate has expired. They were certified before the standards were lifted, in 2008. Then, the standards of stars were lifted and these hotels remained as they were”, he explains in relation to such argument. This situation is also admitted by the ministry of Tourism, the experts of which told Albanian Free Press that thus far, hotels in Albania have allocated the stars by themselves. “All of them have allocated the stars by themselves.
The problem is that with these new criteria which have been imposed through the new regulation, are hard to be delivered by hotels. This means that a hotel which claims that has four stars, can hardly be worthy of a three star hotel with the new system”, they say. Experts also add that it is better if hotels register now, because apart from formalizing, they will also benefit from more state incentives as part of subsidies allocated for tourism. “The majority of them are informal and not all of them declare how many rooms they have. But now, as part of the standardization star based system, they are obliged to declare as many as they can to obtain a star. As a result, they cannot avoid the process”, experts also add about such situation. They also confirm the benefits of the Albanian hotel sector from the new process of certification and the star standards along with the positive effects which the reduction of VAT from 20% to 6% is expected to have.
