Balkans: A Crossroads of Alternative Tourist Routes

International forum in Thessaloniki with speakers from Greece, Cyprus and 6 Balkan countries - Saturday, 10/11/218, 14.30 – 20.00, TIF

Co-organizers: Member of the European Parliament Konstantina Kouneva and the Municipality of Thessaloniki

With the participation of the speakers from Greece, 6 Balkan countries and Cyprus, the international forum for the Balkan tourist cooperation, titled “Balkans: a Crossroad of Alternative Tourist Routes” organised on Saturday 10/11/2018 at the conference center “N. Germanos”, at TIF. The mayor of Thessaloniki, Giannis Boutaris, and Konstantina Kouneva, as co-hosts welcomed the speakers and the guests at the forum. Minister of Tourism Elena Kountoura and Deputy Minister Katerina Notopoulou also greeted.

The Balkan tourist forum is part of a series of initiatives of Member of the European Parliament Konstantina Kouneva for the cooperation of the Balkan countries inside and outside of the EU. At the forum in Thessaloniki 17 speakers from Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus, N. Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina searched for ways concerning the common use of articular but also unexploited tourist resources of the wider region – the natural environment, the monuments, the rich common cultural reserve, its culinary tradition – that grant it the one and only alternative destination for far away big tourist markets

The forum was structured around three thematic groups of conversation:
1. Tourist physiognomy and comparative advantages of the Balkans – essential tourist and transportation infrastructures of interbalkan nature.
2. Ideas concerning the promotion of the Balkan tourist cooperation and good practices. Can a Balkan tourist product be formed?
3. The contribution of tourism in the national growth and the Balkan co-growth.

During the conversations of the forum, reinforcement ways and tools of the regional cooperation concerning tourism were searched. Tourism can constitute the beginning of a wider regional completion, especially now that the European perspective of the West Balkans has a clearer timetable. Additionally, tourism and tourist osmosis of the people of the region constitutes the best “medicine” against the nationalist stress.