Is Montenegro ready for challenges of the summer season?

Tourism workers are optimistic that there will be more tourists this summer than previous ones. Tourist organizations try to attract as many visitors as possible, but when they come, the question arises whether we are ready for them.

According to Tijana Kotarac from the Tourist Organization of Budva, according to the announcements of hoteliers, we are expecting a successful tourist year.

And it is up to us to pass another exam, Budva constantly passes some exams in these numbers when it comes to the sustainability of tourism development and how much this small destination of ours is actually ready to receive such an influx of guests – said Kotarac.

When we present them with all the beauties of our country and convince them to come, most tourists expect that someone will kindly welcome them and serve them. Restaurateurs fear that they will be missing this summer. As Aleksandar Jovanović from the Tourist Organization of Budva said, one of the chronic problems of Montenegrin tourism is the lack of quality and seasonal workforce.

So it will be this year as well. It seems to me to be an even bigger problem than last year and I have a feeling that nothing is being done to improve it. We tap the place, we talk about the problems, we refer, but I don’t see any progress in that sense – said Jovanović.

When asked why this is so, he states that an insufficient number of our students do not enroll in vocational schools. The education system does not follow the needs of the labor market, and somewhere young people are not even motivated to work in Montenegrin tourism. I hear that a good number of them go abroad – said Jovanović.

Working conditions in the hospitality industry are, as he says, significantly better than in previous years, and the fact that wages in the hospitality industry are higher than many in the country does not keep them in Montenegro.

When we talk about cooks, waiters, bartenders, hygienists, their salaries have increased significantly, I don’t think there is a big difference compared to the state administration. Salaries are even higher if we are talking about chefs, and twice as much as in state institutions – says Jovanović. If this trend continues, says Jovanović, we will also have to import labor, while our Employment Bureau has more than 40,000 unemployed citizens.

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