Outdoor Albania partners with World Hotel LInk to offer online booking services to tourism SMEs

www.outdooralbania.com

For the past three years, Outdoor Albania has been fostering a relationship with World Hotel Link, an internet platform that provides online booking services to tourism SMEs (small and mid-sized enterprises) through its online listing sites and hotel website development.


According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, one of the major trends in the tourism industry is “increased looking and booking online.” International travelers are increasingly using the internet to plan their holidays and book their accommodations.  


For tourism enterprises, this means that a strong presence online is more important than ever. Unfortunately, small-scale and mid-sized accommodations often lack the technological infrastructure needed to position themselves online and reach the global marketplace.  


Through its “market place operators” such as Outdoor Albania, World Hotel Link hopes  to bridge the technological gap between locally-owned accommodations and online consumers worldwide.  Small business owners now have the opportunity to list their accommodation on a destination website, and they have the additional option of a high-quality hotel website in English with high results in search engines such as Google.  


World Hotel Link’s destination websites cover three geographical regions of Albania: Shkoder and the North, Tirana and the East, and coming soon: Saranda and the coast.  In addition to listing accommodations and offering instant online booking services, these websites also contain a wealth of tourist information. They provide travelers with information about activities, restaurants, events, and transportation.  Each site’s traffic has been increasing steadily, with an average of 3,093 total weekly pageviews during the months of July and August.


“We are promoting the 'real' Albania, and we are looking for small family- run hotels, guesthouses or sustainable hotels which are interested in a free listing of their accommodation on one of our websites.” says Laura Payne, co-founder of Outdoor Albania.  “Our goal is to bring as much economical gain to small scale accommodations as possible. With WHL, we create a win-win situation.”


One success story is Hotel Lugano in Tirana.  Through its listing on the the WHL Tirana destination page and on its WHL hotel website, Hotel Lugano secured numerous bookings during the summer 2010 season.  Most importantly, Hotel Lugano is findable to those who search for it online.  When “hotel lugano tirana” is entered in a google search box, the destination site and the hotel website appear among the top ten results.  


To see how the accommodation listings appear online, visit the three destination websites at www.travel-tirana.com, www.shkoder-albanian-alps.com and www.albanian-coast.com.

Express: Up Mount Dajti by Cable and down by bicycle

http://outdooralbania.com/
by Cynthia Ord

The city of Tirana is working on its image.  Its current mayor, Edi Rama, is an artist-turned-politician who is eager to introduce Tirana as a vivid European capital.  For the city, this means beautification projects like a fresh coats of colorful paint for formerly gray buildings and a total re-landscaping of the central Skanderbeg Square.

Tirana is indeed looking better, but perhaps the most beautiful part of the city is the nature around it.  Majestic green mountains hover around the city.  One of the highest points on the horizon is Mount Dajti.  Just 26 km outside the city, it measures 1,613 meters of altitude.  The mountain is known as the ‘balcony of Tirana’ and has been declared a national park.

Just a few years ago, a gondola cable lift called the Dajti Express was built to carry site-seers from the city to the mountaintop. For adventure seekers, the best part of the gondola lift is that there is room for bicycles on board.  Outdoor Albania offers a guided excursion that takes visitors up by cable and down by bike through surrounding villages.

The highlight of the trip is a stop at the restaurant built around a panoramic view of the capital below.  It is called Gurra e Perrise, and it is world class. The restaurant has outdoor seating in lush garden terraces. Stunning infinity pools swarm with the trout that also appear on the menu, and lamb roasts slowly on its traditional-style spit. Inside the restaurant, the presidential table is reserved for political personages who bring guests to this little-known lookout above the city.

The bicycle ride down kept me wide-eyed and white-knuckled. Good brakes and a fearless streak required.  There is no better way to enjoy the paradoxes and contrasts of Albania: rural versus urban, cattle versus traffic, and fresh mountain air versus the noise and pollution of the city.  This day trip is also evidence that Tirana is underrated.  Travelers pass through to other parts of the country without realizing the exciting possibilities in and around the city.  This is definitely my favorite OA day trip so far.

This post originally appeared in Cynthia's travel blog, http://sunshineandalbania.blogspot.com/

view from the cable car to Dajti

Panoramic view of Tirana from Dajti

The Tattooed Bunker: Colorful “repurposing” in Shkoder, Northern Albania

by Cynthia Ord



In Albania, around 750,000 bunkers form a gray mushroom network across the country.  This drab legacy of recent communism presents a creative challenge today.  Albanians are transforming the bunkers into more purposeful structures, often with tourism in mind. 

Remnants of a Paranoid Past

Built of thick cement and iron, the bunkers are phone booth-sized subterranean fortresses with rifle windows and cement dome roofs above ground.  Communist dictator Enver Hoxha built them in the 1970s in paranoia of nuclear warfare and xenophobia toward the rest of the world.  The bunkers were never used.  When Hoxha died in 1985, the communist regime lasted about five more years and collapsed with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  

Only two decades later, this history still haunts the present. Most of the 750,000 bunkers are still standing and crumbling slowly where they were built.  Moving or destroying them is no small task. Each one was built with 5 tons of cement to withstand nuclear warfare. Myth has it that Hoxha hired the bunkers’ engineer by instructing him to shelter himself in the prototype while it was attacked by military explosives.  The engineer survived, so Hoxha ordered almost a million of his bunkers to be built.


Creative Repurposing 



Today, Albanians face the question of how to address these scars from the past. Most are simply worked around, while some have been destructed by explosives in order to build in their place.  While the majority of the 2-person pillboxes continue to blight the landscape with concrete and iron, a rare few have been “repurposed” into worthwhile structures such as planters, cafes, playground equipment, and pieces of graffiti art.  

The creative repurposing of cement bunkers is a telling metaphor for Albania’s recovery from its recent communist past.  One project, Concrete Mushrooms, has secured resources for the research and documentation of Albania’s bunkers.  The organization works toward “inverting the meaning” of these symbolic structures by “giving bunkers value instead of having them as a burden”.  Concrete Mushrooms identifies ecotourism-related uses for the bunkers, such as tourism information points, cafes, and even accommodation, as an area with real potential. 


The Tattooed Bunker in Shkoder




On the highland road north from Shkoder to Tamare, where population is sparse, bunkers are also fewer and farther between.  Here, a bright example of creative repurposing can be found. A large bunker has been converted into a tattoo parlor.  This one is easy to spot -- the concrete is colorful, with “tattoo” painted on the outside dome in graffiti-style lettering.  For fearless tattoo shoppers, ink enthusiasts, or those who are simply curious, it is worthwhile to pull over and see this place and the tattoo artist, Keq Marku Djetroshan, who works there mainly during the summer season.  

Having lived in the United States for several years, Keq is fluent in American slang. When his time in the U.S. ended, he came back to northern Albania with his tattoo business.  He serves mostly Albanians and Montenegrins who cross the nearby border.  Inside the bunker-turned-parlor, the walls display more graffiti and an array of dog-eared tattoo art magazines sit on the table in front of the couch.  Keq’s arms are covered with layers of tattoos, perhaps a repurposing of his own scars from the past.  


To visit the tattooed bunker, go to www.shkoder-albanian-alps.com for accommodation and tour information about Albania’s northern region. 
See more photos of Albania.