Once it was Europe’s North Korea, a cloistered communist dictatorship. However, now Albania attracts millions of tourists a year, with a growing portion coming in search of a radiant smile, luscious lips or better breasts.
“I don’t like to talk about medical tourism. It’s a bit scary,” said Dritan Gremi, who heads a dental clinic in the capital, Tirana.
“I prefer to talk about happiness tourism, which makes people happy,” Gremi said.
Photo: AFP
His clinic offers “high-quality care with equipment that is guaranteed and certified” to European standards at a fraction of the price, Gremi said.
He has Italian, French, Belgian and Swiss clients often lured with package deals that include travel and accommodation costs.
With scandals about shoddy work and disfigured clients taking some of the shine off medical tourism elsewhere, Albanian health authorities say they insist on high-quality care.
Photo: AFP
Prosecutors carried out checks on 30 cosmetic clinics last month looking for contraband products and Botox, which is banned in Albania.
Stephane Pealat’s journey to Albania started with the hopes for a new, affordable smile. He and his brother, who are from Valence in the south of France, have long had dental problems, including tooth loss that pushed him to seek a complex dental implant procedure.
“In France we had an initial estimate which was very, very expensive. Then we started looking on the Internet — Bulgaria, Turkey, Albania, Spain,” Pealat said.
He learned about the Gremi clinic during a consultation session in Lyon, France, with Albanian dentists.
After an initial visit in August to tour the facilities in Tirana, Pealat and his brother returned in the autumn.
The dental implant operation he opted for cost about 50,000 euros (US$54,387) in France, compared with just 13,500 euros in Albania, Pealat said.
It was no small amount for Pealat.
“It is important to have a beautiful smile,” he said.
Nathalie Gangloff, who works as an event organizer at a nursing home in Cognac in western France, also opted for an Albania clinic to treat her dental issues.
“My doctor in France told me about a TV documentary” about medical tourism in Albania, Gangloff said.
She paid less than 15,000 euros to have her teeth done compared with the 42,000 euros that she would have had to spend in France. After extractions and implants in February, she returned to Tirana in mid-September for her final work, happy to have regained her smile.
“With my job, it’s important to have beautiful teeth and a good hairdo,” she said, adding that she immediately changed her Facebook profile picture to show off her new pearly whites.
Low overheads and tax have helped Albanian clinics attract customers with lower prices. The country’s medical tourism sector is estimated to earn 200 million to 250 million euros a year, with at least 50,000 Italians visiting Tirana for treatment every year.
However, the procedures are not risk free. Fatmir Ibrahimaj, head of Albania’s national doctors’ association, said foreign and local patients should not rely on online advertising alone for cosmetic procedures.
“A doctor is not a five-star or no-star hotel,” Ibrahimaj said.
For Anna Maria, an Italian from Milan, the “smile of the soul passes also through the lips.”
The psychologist in her 30s — who did not want to give her surname — visited Albania for dental veneers and a lip procedure with the hopes of improving her smile.
“More and more foreign tourists are also getting cosmetic treatments to brighten up their smile,” said Monika Fida, a dermatologist and university lecturer in Tirana.
Injections of hyaluronic acid into the lips are particularly popular.
“Above all, they want to feel good, and have well-shaped lips as naturally as possible,” added Fida, who said 750 to 1,000 foreign patients visit her clinic every year.
Vera Panaitov, a 60-year-old Italian chef from Verona, initially came to have her teeth done.
However, once in Tirana, she had opted for procedures on her breasts and waist.
“You have to be beautiful at any age and experience love and happiness at every moment,” she said, smiling from her hospital bed, saying she felt “happy and rejuvenated.”
French businesswoman Christine Cincunegui might soon follow her.
In Paris, she seemed set on going ahead with a dental procedure in Albania after consulting practitioners visiting the French capital.
“Feeling more beautiful and having fun? What more do we want?” she asked.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
RSS