Prime Minister Edi Rama said this Friday that Albania will be the tourism champion in region by 2030.

Rama expressed full confidence that Tirana's airport can definitely be competitive with Belgrade's airport, and that it can surpass it in terms of the number of passengers this year. While he also warned a high number of tourists from Vlora airport. 

"Albania is experiencing the season of a historic turning point that is the result of many efforts made in previous years and the crowning of a new phase of transformation for tourism, which started a long time ago with the National Program of Urban Renaissance, with special dedication to the areas tourism, with the special dedication to cultural heritage, with the special dedication to the growth of cultural and artistic activities in function of the season. Without doubt also with the continuous support for many investments that the private sector has made in the tourism industry and that today we see the fruits of significant and meaningful money on a path that for us is defined as the path to Albania 2030, where without any doubt Albania will be the absolute champion in our region for tourism. And when I say our region, I mean the Western Balkans. 

While the figures speak of an extraordinary success in terms of almost complete approach to Greece or other countries that are far ahead of us when it comes to the number of tourists per capita. 

In the meantime, I think that at least one element should be underlined, which is the airport of Tirana, which has undergone a very important transformation with the change of the concessionaire with the investments made by the Albanian company in the airport, and in fact I believe you have also seen the classification issued by The European Air Traffic Agency, that Albania in increasing the number of passengers in air traffic is in the first place and today we are in the conditions where we can say without reservation that we are not only competitive with Belgrade airport, which is historically the most largest of our region and with a much, much longer tradition than our airport, but we can probably overtake Belgrade airport in the number of passengers this year. 

And on the other hand, I believe it is important to remember that the Vlora airport site is working according to the schedule. You know that the airport of Vlora will be operated from the airport of Munich and in fact we have a lot of optimism and a lot of confidence that with the introduction of the airport of Vlora we will have a considerable "boom" in the increase in the number of tourists since even though the airport of Tirana today actually works 24 hours a day and has almost 200 flights a day, the possibilities are for much more," Rama said.