Albania, Croatia and the Balkans: Road trip reveals more than Europe’s latest Italy travel ‘dupe’

The clips usually start with water, ice blue or aquamarine, always impossibly clear.

They may show a rippled lake surrounded by high-drama mountains or an immaculate beach decorated with neat rows of umbrellas. A drone shot may zoom across an empty shoreline.

There’s often a dare: Can you believe this is Albania? I wasn’t sure I could.

Over the past five years, my Instagram feed has seen an increasing drip of Albania content. Friends, writers and strangers all insisted that it was the perfect “destination dupe” for Italy, Croatia or Greece. You could have the best of everything, they said — food, nature, nightlife — at a fraction of the cost and without the crowds. Here was the solution for Europe’s overtourism problem.

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I wanted to believe, but it sounded too good to be true. So I was having mixed feelings as I began the Albanian leg of a Balkan road trip last summer.

We’d been on a hot streak since we picked up a camper van in Croatia. We spent a spectacular day on the island of Hvar floating in the sparkling Adriatic, eating seafood pasta and drinking local wine.

We found quiet camping and great swimming on the Peljesac peninsula. We had been awestruck by Montenegro’s Bay of Kotor. What came next was completely unknown to us. Would Albania live up to the hype?

Our plan was to start in the north, but we weren’t sticking to a tight schedule.

The camper van allowed us to be flexible with our movements, so we made much of our itinerary on the fly. We had taken an inland route to start our trip in Shkoder County, a region famous for its mountains, lakes, farm stays and hiking, as well as its history; the city of Shkoder is recognised as one of the country’s most significant cultural centres.

It was supposed to be much quieter than Albanian beaches in the south, where the majority of the country’s tourism is concentrated — like Italy’s Umbria region versus Amalfi.

More than 11.6 million international tourists visited Albania in 2024, up more than 82 per cent from 2019, according to the country’s Institute of Statistics. (Croatia still drew nearly twice as many visitors as Albania, Greece about three times as many and Italy roughly six times more.) Officials are anticipating a higher number for 2025; they’ve already recorded almost 9 million foreign visitors between January and August.

The Tourism Ministry has said the country wants to emphasise sustainable tourism over mass tourism and is trying to balance private interests with public beach access.

But development is booming, with major infrastructure projects, such as the new Vlora International Airport, which is scheduled to open to commercial flights this year, and Jared Kushner’s controversial luxury resorts.

There was no indication that we were in one of Europe’s next hot spots as we drove through Shkoder. In an expanse of farmland surrounded by dry, rocky hills, there were few other cars on the road and the occasional tractor.

It felt more indicative of Albania’s complicated past; from the 1940s to the 1980s, the communist government largely banned contact with the outside world.

We rolled from paved road to gravel, weaving through countryside and villages, past tobacco farms and mosques until we reached Bujtina Rragam, a new guesthouse and restaurant I found on Google Maps that had promising reviews.

Beyond a dusty parking lot, we found a few renovated stone buildings clustered around a manicured lawn; beyond a long deck with wooden tables and chairs, a view of a glassy lake and layers of green hills.

Our room was huge but cozy, with colourful local textiles, high wood-beam ceilings, a fireplace and a balcony. For $90 a night, our reservation also came with a lavish breakfast buffet. We had struck gold. We put our stuff down and followed a beautifully laid stone path to the water, where two men were finishing a deck. One of them was the hotel’s owner, Florian Ahmataj.

Not only had he built the deck, but Ahmataj had also done the construction for the rest of the property, from the stone paths to the wood-beam ceilings we had admired in our room. He’s a contractor in New York, where he has lived with his family since leaving Albania for the United States in 2004. The property, Ahmataj told me, was a love letter to his homeland. “I am from here,” he said. “I had to do something for my country.”

Ahmataj told me that his ancestors had lived on the land for centuries, but it was only recently that he had the idea to transform it into a business.

Five years ago, he started noticing tourists coming to Albania. Sometimes, they would trickle over to his village; cyclists would stop by asking how to get down to the lake, but there wasn’t easy access. Ahmataj decided he would build a path, and a restaurant, and a hotel.

Now open a year, the restaurant, which serves traditional food, regularly gets packed between Albanian and foreign visitors, and the hotel is off to a strong start, Ahmataj said. He hopes that more people in the area will follow suit and start more tourism businesses, and that the local government will do more to support his vision. He recently installed some solar-panelled streetlights himself.

“I love when I see tourists coming to visit us,” he said.

We had planned to stay one night at Bujtina Rragam. But we couldn’t leave.

We extended another day, which gave us the chance to walk to Ahmataj’s cousin’s restaurant down the road for lunch. For about $40, we drank cold Korce beers with a lavish spread of cheese, pickles, fried potatoes and crudites, plus sweet slices of watermelon and cups of espresso. The star of the meal was a fresh fish caught from the lake, where we took long swims each afternoon.

And unlike Lake Como, we had it all to ourselves.The 300km from Shkoder to our beach destination were part easy highway, part hair-raising mountain roads. We had heard driving in Albania was not for the weak.

The US Embassy notes that traffic-related accidents in Albania are higher than in other Eastern and Central European countries. The British Government’s travel advice website is equally sobering: “Driving can be very hazardous and often aggressive and erratic.” It felt that way when drivers passed us on blind turns and cliffside roads.

But we made it to the coast and continued down toward the town of Himare, which was supposed to be calmer than some of the bigger beach cities, such as Vlore, Durres or Sarande.

As we drove along the highway, the Ionian Sea dazzled in the horizon. Above the shimmering water, there were cranes and construction sites for new residential communities, hotels and resorts. It was taking a toll on some visitors; hotel reviews in the area were peppered with construction noise complaints.

Pulling into Himare was a shock to the system after our peaceful days in Rragam. The town’s shoreline was covered in symmetrical rows of umbrellas. Every other beach club had a competing playlist. There was traffic.

But as Instagram had promised, the actual beach was a dead ringer for parts of Italy or Greece; the water was strikingly clear, and the sun beds were plentiful.

Accommodations in town ranged from budget hostels to luxury hotels that cost hundreds per night. We checked in to a guesthouse in a hillside neighbourhood that was a steep climb up from the main drag. Our room cost only $68 per night, but it was small, spartan and dark compared with the sunny photos I had seen online. On the plus side, it was a short walk from the beach.

The owner told us that most of her customers are European, but she hopes more Americans will come. In the meantime, a French family in the room next to ours would be staying for two weeks.

At dusk, the waterfront was teeming with families, couples and vendors. Tourists hauled backpacks and rolled luggage. People looked happy, despite the clashing sound of establishments blaring their own music. Boat tour salespeople angled for customers. There were mobile ATM vans, pizzerias, tourist shops, and arcade games.

For dinner, we found a seafood restaurant in town with positive reviews online. The meal was mediocre, like a tourist trap you would find in Split, Croatia or Santorini, Greece.

We’d gotten a tip about Livadhi Beach, which was still in the region of Himare but allegedly less developed than the town proper and only a few miles north.

At Camping Moskato, only a parking lot separated us from the beach. We paid $49 to park our van under an olive tree, and we could walk to the ocean in under three minutes. It had clean showers, a laundry unit and a restaurant where you could get coffee in the morning and draft beer in a frozen mug at night.

Owner Vasili Joshi told us that his family has owned the Moskato land for generations, but they only started using it commercially in the past decade. First, they used it as a parking lot for beachgoers. By 2015, he saw a huge uptick in visitors and decided to build out the campground. Developers saw the same potential.

Hotels have sprung up around the camp; a nearby luxury hotel runs for more than $420 per night during peak season. Beach clubs compete for space, and some reviews now complain that Livadhi is “very overrun by sun lounges”.

While Joshi says he has benefited directly from the growth of tourism, he also has concerns. He has seen prices skyrocket for locals and visitors alike; he’s worried about corruption and becoming too dependent on an industry that relies on the whims of foreign travellers’ appetite for vacation. Mostly, he’s worried about being pushed out by the government or developers. “Maybe one day they will come and say, ‘Yeah, we have a big project … and you have to go away,’” he said.

Before we left, Joshi sent us off with travel tips and a gallon of raki, Albania’s traditional liquor, that his mother had made.

We spent the afternoon hiking between stone beaches — one that took a decent trek to reach but felt like being on a secret island; no commercial sun beds, just a hut with grill going, serving cocktails.

Back near Livadhi, at Blue Bay Restaurant, we ate small, fried local fish; a salad of orange slices, olives and white onion; seafood pasta; and a plate of boiled wild greens called nena. Add the wine and a round of espresso, and it came out to $60, one of our most expensive meals — and still far less expensive than what I’ve encountered in Puglia, Italy; Mallorca, Spain; or even Malta. It was also one of our best.

From Livadhi, we returned inland, driving past the city of Berat, known for its white Ottoman houses that line the Osum River, to spend the night camping at the lovely Alpeta Agrotourism & Winery in Roshnik. Then it was back to Tirana to return the van and stay at an airport hotel — a harsh ending to our Balkan adventure.

A week wasn’t nearly enough. We never made it to the country’s tallest peaks, its most remote villages or even to one of the two “Blue Eye” springs — famous jewel-toned pools where icy water bubbles up from caves so deep divers still haven’t found the bottom. There are idyllic beaches you can reach only by boat and ruins older than Rome that we didn’t have time to see.

When friends ask us about our trip to Albania, we don’t tell them it was like Italy or Greece.

We tell them about Bujtina Rragam: the pleasure of waking up in a rural village surrounded by mountains and farmland, and walking across the grass to a breakfast spread of fresh cheese, produce from neighbouring farms, and chewy fried dough dipped in local honey and fig jam.

How I had one of the most memorable swims of my life in a lake to ourselves.

We tell them about sharing the road with a goat herder and his flock. About white-knuckling the drive to the coast. About being dumbfounded by the colour of the water at Livadhi Beach.That we were most disappointed when we were surrounded by new hotels and beach clubs made in the image of other places. We were happiest when Albania felt like Albania.