Albania self drive tour, 20 days

Planet

This trip forms part of a business wide initiative to promote destinations in Europe as a more environmentally friendly choice for your next holiday. Albania is a particularly good example of this, as despite the fact it is a little closer to home than a lot of long-haul destinations, it is still a real adventure with a wide diversity of landscapes, amazing history, and cultural highlights. A little less carbon footprint with the same excitement. Win, win!
Also, this initiative is really supported by the length of this specific Albania trip. The longer the holiday, the more worthwhile the flight, pollution-wise!
Generally, our trips include some form of human powered transport. To properly enjoy the incredible landscape of Albania, we encourage you to kayak around the spectacular lakes and do as much hiking as possible- get up close and personal with nature! In this way, we are very nature positive, and have a range of blogs and inspiration pages encouraging ethical codes of conduct to reduce your impact on environmental degradation.
There are lots of opportunities to enjoy traditional local food on this trip. From cooking classes to home cooked meals, all ingredients will be seasonal and locally sourced, usually from the closest market, and prepared with the goodness of the local hospitality. Overall, this greatly reduces food miles, and improves your experience at the same time.
We encourage our customers to be responsible by championing our 'make it meaningful' policy that promotes animal welfare, 0 waste and a slower pace of travel to maximise enjoyment and immersion in the chosen destination. We have blogs titled things like 'zero waste while travelling: our top tips' that give our customers a helpful guide about being responsible on their travels.
Back home in Brighton, we work in a soon-to-be B-corp co-working space and have an almost entirely paper free office where the team is committed to recycling, community gardening and will be cheerleading (yet another!) beach clean with our co-working space next month.

People

This trip is almost unrivalled in its diversity of locally owned special stays. Ranging from the architecturally authentic in Shkodra and Berat to your locally run guesthouse on the riviera, to a homestay experience in the alps, you will also get the chance to enjoy hospitality and home cooked meals at your guesthouse on Lake Ohrid.
Regarding food, this trip has several opportunities to enjoy local and traditional food, an experience enabled by expert Albanian local guides such as the local chef in Berat.
This itinerary also features many places that are less frequented by the usual tourist footfall, such as the castles of Gjirokastra, Ksamil’s quieter quarter, and cultural capital Korca. Naturally, increasing sustainable tourism to these off the beaten track locations helps to boost the local economy.
We also encourage you to visit local markets on your trip, and to buy and try products that are location specific. These include the 500-year-old Bazaar in Kruja, the country’s first brewery in Korca.
Employing local people is of paramount importance to our itineraries. This works twofold: your itinerary will support the local economy by employing local people, whilst also giving you the best and most authentic tours available. This commitment is further supported when we work with local partners to put together your overall itinerary from the get-go. Not only are these local partners the ultimate experts in their destination because they live there, but they will also be on hand 24/7 in-location to support you on your trip.