Ida Ismail
The Tax Administration has published Tourism Sectoral Plan for 2026, as an important step towards full formalization of the sector and increased fiscal transparency. Essentially, this plan attempts to strike a balance between increasing budget revenues and creating a fairer market for tourism operators. However, while the document presents objectives and monitoring mechanisms, it remains to be seen how much will be implemented on the ground.
Tourism in Albania has been one of the most dynamic sectors of the economy, contributing increasingly to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). However, this growth has not always been accompanied by a satisfactory level of formalization. Informality, partial declarations of income or salaries of employees have created a terrain where operators evade fiscal obligations.
The plan treats tourism primarily as a sector with a high risk of informality. This is noticeable throughout the plan's architecture, where the concepts of "deviant behavior", "high risk", "intensive monitoring" and "unannounced checks" dominate.
The very fact that the administration foresees weekly turnover analyses, automatic comparisons between the number of employees and the capacity of structures, or monitoring platforms such as Booking and Airbnb, shows that the state continues to consider a significant part of the tourism economy as undeclared or partially invisible.
The 2026 plan recognizes this problem and places it at the center of its intervention, but the real challenge lies in the fact that these phenomena have been entrenched for years and cannot be solved solely with more frequent inspections or more advanced systems.
Ambitious targets and pressure on businesses
The 2026 plan aims for full formalization and tax transparency, integrating the tourism sector into the Albanian tax system with intensive monitoring.
The plan includes several key objectives such as:
- Increased turnover compared to 2025 and correct VAT registration based on real data such as the number of rooms and employees.
- Accurate declaration of employees, including professional categorization and work schedules.
- Reduction of fictitious salaries, especially cases of declaring minimum wage without justification.
- Expansion of the VAT base, with an increase in entities declaring at a rate of 6% (accommodation) and 20% (bars-restaurants).
- Formalization of the market, including informal accommodation structures and beach resorts.
- Development of alternative tourism, such as agrotourism, mountain tourism and cultural tourism.
- Increased income from DIVA/TAPB, especially for individuals who generate income from platforms like Booking and Airbnb
Another striking element in the document is the way the sector's success is measured almost exclusively through fiscal indicators. The plan talks about increasing declared turnover, expanding the VAT base, and increasing the number of formalized entities, but there are no indicators related to the quality of tourism or the real economic value it creates.
There are no concrete targets for increasing spending per tourist, extending average stay, improving wages in the sector, or impacting the local economy. In this sense, the document looks more like a strategy for fiscal formalization of tourism than a genuine plan for its long-term development.
One of the main pillars of the plan is the use of technology and artificial intelligence to identify high-risk subjects.
However, this approach raises several questions. How prepared is the administration to accurately manage and interpret this large volume of data? And on the other hand, how prepared are businesses, especially small ones, to adapt to this new level of digital monitoring?
Without a proper education and assistance process, digitalization can become an additional burden instead of a relief.
In this context, the use of artificial intelligence for fiscal monitoring represents one of the most unusual aspects of the plan. The administration intends to use AI systems to analyze photos of fiscal invoices, identify missing fiscal elements, and create automatic reports on suspicious entities.
In theory, this could reduce administrative costs and increase the efficiency of controls. However, it remains unclear whether the technological infrastructure and human capacities of the administration are sufficient to manage such a complex system without producing errors, misinterpretations or unfair penalties.
Another question is related to the institutional capacity to implement the plan uniformly across the territory. The document relies on coordination between the tax administration, municipalities, the Ministry of Tourism, digital platforms and other institutions. However, in practice, Albania continues to face problems of institutional fragmentation, lack of human resources and selective implementation of controls.
For this reason, the challenge lies not only in technology or law, but in the real ability of institutions to guarantee equal standards and a reliable process for businesses.
The plan envisages targeted controls based on risk analysis, continuous monitoring and rapid intervention in deviant behaviour. This is a modern approach and theoretically more efficient than the random checks of the past. However, concerns remain about how this will be implemented in practice. Transparency in the selection of subjects for control and the avoidance of administrative abuse are key elements for the success of the plan.
Another problem is the lack of measurable objectives in the document. The plan repeatedly uses terms such as “increase,” “formalization,” “reduction,” or “improvement,” but rarely specifies precisely what level it aims to achieve by the end of 2026.
There are no concrete figures on the level of informality that is intended to be reduced, the additional income that is expected to be generated, or the number of entities that are expected to be formalized. This makes it difficult to truly measure the success of the plan and creates room for the results to be interpreted more politically than economically.
The plan also notes a strong focus on small businesses and seasonal activities, especially daily rental apartments, family structures, agritourism and beach resorts. These categories are considered high-risk for informality and will be subject to increased monitoring.
However, the document says little about the larger structural issues of the sector, such as the concentration of investment in a few large players, intensive development on the coastline, or the impact of strategic investments on market competition. This creates the perception that the main burden of formalization may fall disproportionately on small operators, who also have the most limited administrative and financial capacities.
Another critical element is the contradiction between the strict monitoring approach and the existence of the fiscal amnesty law, which is mentioned in the document as a formalization instrument.
On the one hand, the plan foresees intensive controls, referrals for investigation and the use of artificial intelligence to identify evasion. On the other hand, the fiscal amnesty creates the idea that informality can be tolerated or regulated later through new agreements.
Equally important is the lack of a broader dimension of tourism management. The document speaks extensively about fiscal controls, but very little about the challenges that are accompanying the rapid growth of the sector: pressure on infrastructure, waste management, water supply, coastal pollution, labor shortages, or intensive urbanization.
The Tourism Sector Plan 2026 represents a serious attempt to address the structural problems of the sector. It brings modern instruments and a more structured approach to fiscal control. However, its success will depend more on the way it is implemented than on its content on paper.
If controls are accompanied by transparency, real assistance to businesses and equal implementation standards, the plan could contribute to the gradual formalization of the sector. But if it remains primarily an instrument of fiscal pressure without addressing the broader problems of the Albanian tourism model, then it risks producing more tension between the administration and business than a real transformation of the tourism economy.acqj.al
