Albania’s New Hotel Scene: Worth Getting Excited About
Albania’s accommodation market has transformed faster in the last three years than in the previous three decades. When we started writing about Albania seriously, the choice was essentially: family guesthouse (excellent food, unpredictable beds), basic city hotel (functional, forgettable), or luxury international chain (expensive, identical to anywhere else in the world). The middle ground — genuinely good boutique hotels with design sensibility, quality beds, and authentic character — barely existed.
It exists now. And 2025 has seen some of the most impressive new openings yet. This is our rundown of the places we are genuinely excited about, based on our own visits and the reliable reports of people whose taste we trust.
A note on how this list was compiled: we have either visited these properties ourselves or have spoken at length with multiple travellers who have. We are not listing anything based purely on press releases or hotel websites. Albania’s hospitality scene is too young for us to rely on marketing copy alone.
Tirana: The Capital Grows Up
Tirana’s hotel scene has evolved from “choose between the Plaza and a backpacker hostel” to something far more interesting. The Blloku neighbourhood and several adjacent streets now have enough quality boutique options that choosing between them is a genuine pleasure.
Tirana is also the city where a good hotel location matters most — you want to be within walking distance of the Blloku restaurant scene, the Bunkart museums, the New Bazaar, and Skanderbeg Square. The best new properties have figured this out and positioned themselves accordingly.
A Note on the Blloku Boutique Surge
Several boutique properties opened in or around the Blloku district through late 2024 and into 2025, converting communist-era apartments and villas into genuinely beautiful hotels. The best of these take the neighbourhood’s specific character — its layered history, its mix of original 1970s modernism and new construction — and turn it into an asset rather than hiding it. Exposed concrete, local artwork, Albanian design details: these hotels feel like they belong to Tirana rather than floating above it.
What to look for in a Tirana boutique hotel: location within walking distance of Blloku (for restaurants) and Skanderbeg Square (for sightseeing), rooms that are actually quiet (Tirana is a noisy city and this matters more than you might expect), and breakfast that includes local products rather than a generic international buffet.
If you are visiting Tirana for the first time and want to make the most of your stay, a guided walking tour of Tirana is the best first-day activity regardless of where you are staying — it gives you the context and the neighbourhood orientation that makes everything else more rewarding. Our full where to stay in Tirana guide covers the neighbourhood breakdown and accommodation tier options.
For a deeper historical understanding of the city before heading out independently, a communist Albania tour with BunkArt museum visit is a half-day investment that fundamentally changes how you see the city. The best new hotels in Tirana understand this — some of them have the BunkArt museums on their recommended activity list and can help with booking.
Berat: Heritage Hotels Done Right
Berat is having its accommodation moment. The UNESCO-listed city’s distinctive Ottoman houses — large, multi-storey structures with characteristic large windows — had been slowly converting to guesthouses for years, but 2025 has seen several new properties open that represent a significant step up in quality.
The best of the new Berat properties sit in the Mangalem quarter on the slope below the castle, in Ottoman houses that have been restored with careful attention to original features. Stone walls, wooden beam ceilings, and the characteristic wide bay windows overlooking the Osum river are preserved rather than plastered over. The materials are local. The furniture, in the best cases, is either antique or made by Albanian craftspeople.
What these properties have figured out is that in a city as architecturally distinctive as Berat, the building itself is the main amenity. A well-restored Ottoman house does not need to compensate with an elaborate spa or a rooftop pool. The rooms, the light, the views across the river to the Gorica quarter on the opposite bank — these are enough.
The food offering at the better Berat properties has also improved. Some now offer cooking experiences as part of the stay. A cooking class in Berat is worth booking in advance — the sessions typically fill quickly, particularly in spring and early summer, and the experience of learning to prepare Albanian traditional dishes in Berat’s setting is one of the most memorable things you can do in the city.
Book well ahead for summer visits. The new properties have relatively few rooms and word is spreading faster than inventory is being added.
The Riviera: Boutique Meets Coastline
The Albanian Riviera has always had somewhere to stay — from the most basic private rooms to the more established guesthouses in Himara and Saranda. What it lacked for years was the boutique hotel category: properties designed with genuine care for the guest experience rather than simply as a room-and-bed transaction.
2025 changed this in several places along the coast.
Himara area: Several new properties have opened on the hillsides above the Himara coast, taking advantage of the extraordinary views across the Ionian. The approach in the best of these is minimal and considered: white render, local stone accents, terraces that face west for the sunset, pools that overflow visually toward the sea. This is not flashy architecture — it suits the landscape precisely because it does not try to compete with it.
Himara-based properties are also well-positioned for the boat tour experience. Albanian Riviera boat tours from Himara access the sea caves and hidden coves along the coast — the best accommodation in Himara can typically arrange these through local operators, saving you the logistical effort of organising independently.
Dhermi: The village that has become the Riviera’s nightlife hub has also attracted more considered accommodation development. Properties here face the challenge of being near enough to the beach and the evening scene without being embedded in the noise. The better new openings have solved this by sitting slightly above the village with private transport down to the coast.
Around Saranda: The expansion of accommodation options near Saranda and Ksamil has been rapid, and quality varies considerably. We are more selective here than anywhere else on the coast because the volume of new development means more variation in what you actually get. Our where to stay in Saranda guide separates the genuinely good from the overclaiming.
For the best of the southern section — Ksamil, Blue Eye, Butrint — properties that can help arrange a Best of Saranda day tour for guests are the most useful. This covers all the southern highlights in a single day and is the most efficient way to experience the area if you are time-limited.
Permet: The Mountain Boutique Surprise
We did not expect Permet to become a boutique accommodation story, but here we are. The small town in the Vjosa valley has quietly developed a handful of genuinely lovely guesthouse and small hotel options, driven by the combination of the town’s growing reputation for food and wine, the Benja thermal baths, and the new Vjosa Wild River National Park.
The properties in Permet are not luxury in any conventional sense — these are family-run operations with small room counts and food that comes from the family’s garden. But the quality of care, the sense of place, and the extraordinary setting put them in a different category from what “guesthouse” suggests in most of the world.
The Benja thermal baths proximity is a major advantage for Permet accommodation. The best properties can arrange morning transport to the springs and know the access logistics well. A guided thermal baths experience near Permet is worth booking for a first visit regardless of whether your accommodation provides the logistics — the guide’s knowledge of the pools and the springs makes the experience considerably richer.
Spend two nights in Permet. Eat dinner in the guesthouse. Drink the local wine. Go to the thermal baths in the morning before anyone else arrives. This is the Albania that people mean when they say it is different from everywhere else.
Gjirokastra: Quality Rising in the Stone City
Gjirokastra has seen its accommodation options improve significantly in the last two years. The challenge for Gjirokastra guesthouses has always been the stone city’s architecture — the buildings are magnificent but complex, requiring careful restoration to be comfortable without destroying what makes them extraordinary.
The best new Gjirokastra properties have solved this. They have taken the grey stone, the heavy wooden beams, the deep-set windows, and worked with them rather than modernising them into irrelevance. The result is accommodation that genuinely belongs to the place it occupies.
For first-time visitors to Gjirokastra, the investment in a guided Gjirokastra city tour is well worth making alongside the accommodation. The city’s history is too layered to absorb through reading alone — a local guide who can point to specific buildings and explain why they exist gives you the frame for everything you observe independently afterward.
What Good Albanian Hotels Have in Common in 2025
After visiting a lot of new properties this year and the end of last year, we have noticed some patterns in what makes the best ones work.
They use local materials and food. The guesthouses and boutique hotels we come back to are the ones where the cheese at breakfast came from a farm twenty kilometres away and the stone on the walls was quarried locally. This is not just aesthetically pleasing — it signals that the owners care about where they are.
They have staff who actually know the area. The best hotels in Albania can tell you where to eat dinner beyond their own restaurant, what the best hike is given your fitness level, which beach is best on a windy day. This local knowledge is more valuable than any amenity.
They are honest about their limitations. Albania is not a country where boutique hotel infrastructure is mature. The best properties know what they do well and what they do not, and they tell you upfront. We trust owners who say “our breakfast is excellent, but the gym is just two machines in a room” more than those who describe a basic amenity list as if it were a resort.
The rooms are quiet. In both Tirana and coastal towns, noise is a genuine issue. The properties that have thought about this — double-glazed windows, rooms away from the street, good air conditioning that does not sound like a helicopter — are worth the premium.
What We Are Watching for the Rest of 2025
Several properties are reportedly opening later in 2025 that have the potential to be genuinely significant additions to Albania’s accommodation landscape. We will update our destination guides as these open and we have had the chance to visit.
The pipeline of new hotels and guesthouses suggests that Albania’s accommodation transformation is still in the middle of its arc rather than approaching completion. The country went from almost nothing worth recommending to a growing list of genuinely good options remarkably quickly. If that trajectory continues — and the investment we are seeing suggests it will — Albania in 2027 or 2028 may have a boutique hotel scene that rivals the most developed destinations in the region.
For now, book early, read reviews carefully, and check for updates in our destination-specific accommodation guides. The best places fill up, and the worst places have professional websites. Knowing the difference is most of the battle.
