I was sitting with a friend in a Vlorë bar in May, sipping some excellent homemade raki – we were out there with a football tour we’d organised – when he leaned over and said, “Did you know there’s a British TV programme being filmed in Dhermi? Lots of pretty people on the beach.”
I confessed my ignorance. Mainly on the basis that, at 55 and rather grey, watching a load of pretty twenty-somethings cavorting around on a beach feels rather wrong. It’s not my kind of programme anyway.
My interest was piqued though. I suggested Love Island as a likely candidate. He knew it wasn’t that. A bit of digging later and we established it was, in fact, TOWIE – The Only Way Is Essex – filming at a resort in Dhermi that I’ll leave nameless (I know exactly where it is, but just in case it’s a state secret). “It’s due to be shown late summer,” he said. And then, as these things do, it dropped off my radar entirely.
Until last week, when a potential customer called me and said they’d seen Albania on the television and how amazing it looked. And I thought – ah. Yes. TOWIE.
What Happens When a TV Programme Discovers Your Destination
It always intrigues me when television showcases a destination. Wherever Race Around the World goes, that country sees an immediate and significant spike in interest. Not just that programme – pretty much any show that puts a place in front of millions of viewers has the same effect. People see somewhere they hadn’t considered and suddenly it’s on the list.
You’d think that’s an unambiguously good thing. In some ways it is. The hoteliers won’t complain. The restaurants won’t turn the business away. We certainly won’t.
But is it really good for Albania? That’s the question I keep coming back to.
Dhermi is already showing signs of creaking under the strain of summer tourism. It’s a beautiful village – genuinely stunning, with that extraordinary stretch of pebbled beach and water that photographs barely do justice to – but the infrastructure is being pushed. The roads, the parking, the capacity of the restaurants and the beach itself in peak July and August are already at their limits. A TOWIE effect, driving thousands of additional visitors specifically to that stretch of coastline, isn’t necessarily the gift it might appear to be.
Infrastructure takes time to develop. The kind of sustainable, well-managed tourism that actually benefits a country and its people long-term doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen when a destination is overwhelmed before it’s ready.
There Is So Much More to Albania Than the Riviera
Here’s the thing that frustrates me slightly – and I say this as someone who has been travelling to Albania, including many years living there, since 1993, long before anyone outside the country really knew it existed.
The Albanian Riviera is extraordinary. I’m not dismissing it for a second. The water is among the clearest in the Mediterranean. The coastline from Vlorë south to Sarandë is genuinely world-class. Dhermi, Himarë, Qeparo, Ksamil – these are places of real and rare beauty.
However, they are one chapter of a much longer and richer story.
Albania has two UNESCO World Heritage Sites – Berat and Gjirokastër – that are among the most beautifully preserved Ottoman towns in the entire world. It has Butrint, one of the most significant ancient archaeological sites in the Balkans, with layers of Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Venetian history accumulated over nearly three thousand years. It has the Albanian Alps – the Accursed Mountains – with valleys and landscapes that will genuinely take your breath away. It has a wine culture that stretches back four thousand years, with indigenous grape varieties you won’t find anywhere else on earth. It has food that takes extraordinary pride in the land it comes from. It has a warmth of hospitality – rooted in the ancient code of besa – that is unlike anywhere else in Europe.
TOWIE will show you a beach. A beautiful beach, certainly. But a beach.
Do We Really Want TOWIE Tourists?
I want to be careful here – I’m not trying to bite the hand that feeds me, and I’m absolutely not suggesting that everyone who visits the Albanian Riviera is only interested in lying on a sun lounger. The customer who called me last week after seeing Albania on television is, in fact, exactly the kind of curious, engaged traveller who wants to experience the full country. That conversation may well lead to a tailor-made tour that takes in Berat, Gjirokastër, the Alps and the Riviera.
But I’d wager my last Lekë that the majority of people drawn to Albania specifically because of TOWIE won’t be looking for that. They’ll be looking for the beach, the bars, the vibe. Which is fine – that’s a legitimate holiday. But it’s not what Albania needs more of right now.
We’ve already seen what that looks like. Sarandë and Ksamil have experienced an explosion of interest driven largely by TikTok over the past few years. Whilst the visitor numbers are undeniably up, the character of those places has changed significantly as a result. The infrastructure hasn’t kept pace, the prices have risen sharply, and the quiet, unspoilt quality that made them special in the first place is harder to find with every passing summer. Do we really want a repeat of that in Dhermi?
What Albania needs – and what it genuinely deserves – is visitors who want to return. Who want to go deeper. Who want to experience the culture, engage with the history, eat the food properly, drink the wine, walk in the mountains, sit in a Vlorë bar at midnight drinking raki with a local and talk about life.
Those are the visitors who come back. Who tell their friends. Who become genuine advocates for a country that has given them something they didn’t expect and can’t quite explain.
TOWIE might bring more people to Dhermi. Whether it brings the right people to Albania is a different question entirely.
Want to See the Real Albania?
We’ve been creating tailor-made holidays to Albania since 1993 – private guided tours, cultural itineraries, wine tours, fly-drives and everything in between. If you’d like to experience the Albania that doesn’t make it onto the television, we’d love to help.
📞 0203 822 0299
✉️ info@experiencealbania.co.uk
🌍 www.experiencealbania.co.uk
