Once it was Europe’s North Korea, a cloistered communist dictatorship. But now Albania lures 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 his clinic offers “high-quality care with equipment that is guaranteed and certified” to European standards at a fraction of the price.
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. Prosecutors carried out checks on 30 cosmetic clinics this 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 suffered from 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, Turkiye, Albania, Spain,” said Pealat. He learned about the Gremi clinic .
