By Professor Alaa Garad
Tirana Times, April 07, 2026 – In my earlier article for Tirana Times, I described Albania as a country that moves from being visited to being remembered. Having since deepened my engagement with the Albanian health tourism and hospitality ecosystem, and having had the privilege of spending time on the ground, I find myself returning to a question that feels increasingly urgent: what does it take to translate Albania’s natural and human advantages into a service offering that the world not only notices, but trusts?
The answer lies in a framework that has quietly shaped service excellence thinking across more than one hundred countries yet deserves far greater attention in the Western Balkans context. The 5Ps Service Excellence Model was originally developed by Philip Forrest through a foundational study at Brunel University, London, and built into internationally recognised standards by Robert Keay, co-founder of the International Customer Experience Institute (ICXI). Together with their colleagues, they gave the world a framework of five essential dimensions: Policy, Products and Services, Premises, Processes and People. These are the building blocks of any organisation that wants to deliver not just good service, but excellent, consistent and trustworthy service. The standard is certified by the British Standards Institution and has been adopted in over one hundred countries. I am delighted to acknowledge Robert as a mentor and friend, and ICXI as a partner of the Stirling Centre.
Let me walk through each P through the lens of Albanian service providers. I will end with a sixth dimension that I believe is Albania’s most immediate competitive advantage.
P1: Policy: The Foundations Are There. Now Operationalise Them
Albania has made genuine progress in establishing service quality policies across healthcare, tourism, higher education and hospitality. Government frameworks exist. Aspirations are clearly stated. There is real political will. What is more challenging is the operationalisation of policy at the service provider level. There is frequently a gap between what is written in a national strategy and what a nurse, a hotel receptionist, a lecturer or a restaurant manager does on a Tuesday morning.
Closing that gap requires investment in implementation, training and, most critically, monitoring and measurement. What gets measured gets managed. Service providers in Albania should not wait for policy to reach them; they should actively seek to understand what the national and international standards require and build internal systems that bring those standards to life every day. More accountability, more transparency and more systematic feedback loops between policymakers and frontline providers would transform the picture rapidly.
P2: Products (and Services) — Quality Must Match the Story
Albania’s natural assets are extraordinary. The coastline, the mountains, the cuisine, the history, the culture: these are real and compelling, and the world is beginning to take notice. What the service sector now needs to ensure is that the quality of its offering matches the quality of the story being told. International patients, conference delegates, academic visitors and wellness tourists arrive with expectations shaped by what they have read and heard. The service delivery experience must honour those expectations and ideally exceed them. This means investment in product development, service design, quality standards and continuous improvement across every sector.
P3: Premises — Infrastructure Is Improving. Keep Going
Significant investment has been made in Albania’s physical infrastructure in recent years, and it shows. Hotels are modern, facilities are clean, and new developments are bringing international standards to areas that were previously underdeveloped. The challenge now is consistency. World-class premises in Tirana must be matched by adequate facilities in Golem, in Shkodër, in Sarandë. The full promise of Albanian service excellence is only realised when the experience is reliably consistent across the country, not concentrated in the capital.
P4: Processes — The Hidden Engine of Service Quality
Processes are the dimension where the most significant work remains to be done, and it is the most invisible. A warm welcome at reception is immediately felt. A broken appointment system or a confusing referral pathway is equally felt, and it lingers. For healthcare providers, this means clinical pathways, patient communication protocols, follow-up procedures and complaint management systems. For hospitality providers, it means booking flows, service recovery systems and feedback mechanisms. Processes are what turn a good intention into a reliable outcome, every time, for every customer.
Albanian service providers should invest in mapping their key processes, identifying where they break down and systematically improving them. International accreditation bodies, including those that the Stirling Centre works alongside, can provide the structured frameworks to do exactly this.
P5: People — Albania’s Greatest Strength and Its Most Important Investment
The warmth, the pride, the willingness to go beyond what is expected: these are qualities I have observed personally in Albania and that visitors consistently remark upon. Albanian people are natural hosts. From the moment I arrived at the airport on my first visit, to the cafes of Tirana, to the conversations with healthcare professionals and academics, I encountered a genuine desire to serve well. This is not something that can be taught in a classroom. It is a cultural asset.
The work now is to complement that natural warmth with structured professional development: coaching, mentoring, service standards training, language skills and, for those working in health tourism and hospitality, international certification. People are simultaneously Albania’s greatest existing asset and its most urgent investment priority.
P6: Price — Albania’s Bonus P and Its Most Powerful Competitive Advantage
Here is a truth that Albania should be far bolder in communicating to the world. When it comes to Price, Albania is not merely competitive. It is exceptional. A dental procedure that costs €2,000 in the United Kingdom can be performed to equivalent clinical standards in Albania for a fraction of that cost. A wellness retreat, a specialist consultation, a cosmetic procedure, a post-operative recovery programme in a beautiful coastal setting: across the board, Albania offers a value proposition that simply does not exist at comparable quality in Western Europe.
This is not a compromise on quality. It is a structural advantage, rooted in lower operating costs, a highly educated workforce, and a currency that makes Albania affordable to international visitors in a way that has nothing to do with cutting corners. Combined with its climate, its accessibility by air from major European cities, and the warmth of its people, the price advantage makes Albania one of the most compelling service destinations on the continent.
The message to Albanian service providers is unambiguous: your Price is not something to apologise for. It is something to lead with, provided you pair it consistently with the quality that makes it credible.
Government and Service Providers: A Partnership That Must Deepen
One of the most powerful levers available to the Albanian government is something that a large neighbouring country has already begun to act on. Mechanisms exist in some regional economies that reimburse healthcare and hospitality service providers for the costs of obtaining international accreditation. This is a direct investment in service quality that pays for itself many times over in the reputation, patient confidence and revenue it generates. Albania should seriously explore similar models: reducing the financial burden of accreditation for service providers across healthcare, hospitality, education and beyond, and creating incentive structures that make quality investment not just desirable but financially logical for every operator.
More broadly, the relationship between government policymakers and frontline service providers needs to become more dynamic, more reciprocal and far more continuous. Providers have insights that policymakers need. Policymakers have resources and frameworks that providers need. The synergy is waiting to be activated, and it will not happen without deliberate effort from both sides. Monitoring, measurement and transparent reporting of service quality outcomes should become a national conversation, not a bureaucratic exercise.
Citizens as Success Partners: Every Interaction Counts
There is a dimension to service excellence that no policy, no process and no training programme can fully substitute for: the everyday behaviour of citizens. Every taxi driver who helps a lost visitor, every market trader who takes care with a tourist’s purchase, every student who assists a foreign guest with directions: these people are service excellence ambassadors. Albania’s greatest competitive advantage is ultimately its people, and this extends far beyond those formally employed in the service sector. Building a culture of service pride is not a sectoral endeavour. It is a national one. Every citizen is a stakeholder in Albania’s reputation, and every positive interaction is a contribution to a story the world is only beginning to tell.
The Western Balkans: The Place to Be Next
Albania does not stand alone in this opportunity. Across Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, there is a shared and unmistakeable momentum. A generation of entrepreneurs, educators, healthcare professionals and public servants is building institutions and service offerings that deserve international recognition. These countries are navigating the path towards European Union integration with genuine ambition, and in doing so they have an extraordinary opportunity: to learn from their future sister states across Europe, while simultaneously enriching the European service ecosystem with their own culture, creativity and distinctiveness.
The post-conflict era is behind these nations. What lies ahead is a new chapter, one of institution-building, quality investment and regional solidarity. The Western Balkans is not simply catching up with Europe. In certain dimensions, including that crucial sixth P of Price, it is already ahead. The question is whether the region will seize the moment with the strategic clarity and collective will it deserves.
Looking Ahead: An Evolving Framework
I want to be transparent about something. The 5Ps framework described in this article is the foundation, not the ceiling. In a companion piece that is under review, I introduced the 7Ps of the Learning-Driven Service Organisation, an evolution that integrate the original 5Ps with a forward-facing capability model built around Learning, Innovation, Foresight and Excellence. That work is ongoing, and Albania and the wider Western Balkans are very much part of the thinking behind it.
For now, I leave Albanian service providers with a simple challenge: take the 5Ps seriously, own the sixth, and build the culture that makes all six works. I am genuinely excited about what this country and this region are becoming. The foundations are being laid. The moment is yours.
Yours in Learning, Alaa Garad
Acknowledgements: The 5Ps Service Excellence Model was created by Philip Forrest (Brunel University, London) and developed into international standards by Robert Keay, co-founder of the International Customer Experience Institute (ICXI). The ICXI standards, including TISSE 2012 and ICXS 2019, are certified by the British Standards Institution and adopted in over 100 countries.
Reference: Garad, A. and Gold, J. (2019), “The learning-driven organization: toward an integrative model for organizational learning,” Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 51 No. 6, pp. 329–341.
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