Cultural/heritage tourism strategic planning in Albania. Analysing Berat, as a world heritage patrimony, protected by UNESCO.

Cultural/Heritage tourism market has always been seen as very important in tourism development in Albania, even before 90’s. It’s important in nowadays to be focused in a very well planned development of this form of tourism, as cultural tourism is trying to be one of the key determinants of Albanian tourism development. In Albania it has been developed since before 90’s, time when tourism itself did not have the proper attention by the government. It must be emphasized that cultural tourism development implies at the same time the lack of use of some cultural sites and fast degradation of certain others. This problem  points out a significant  two sided imbalance in the cultural tourism market. So, there are needed a lot of efforts in terms of strategic plans of cultural tourism development to enhance positive impacts of it. In this paper we aim to point out some of the problems related to the focus of strategic plans in developing  sustainable cultural tourism in Albania.   The following issues will be addressed:   Tourism strategies developed in Albania regarding tourism and cultural/heritage. Defining key success factors of cultural/heritage tourism in Albania, focused especially on sustainable development.   Our goal is to demonstrate how the overall analysis of these issues may improve the integration between development and conservation of heritage, not only to meet the challenges of emerging trends in cultural tourism, but mainly to keep heritage alive, diversify its uses and enhance its ability to improve the quality of life of the contemporary society