COVER STORY
to destination integrity. We must work together
with the community in a cooperative way in order
to provide authentic, legitimate, and meaningful
experiences to tourists while at the same time
maintain the integrity of the local cultures,
historical sites, land, and wildlife.
Global Challenges to Macedonian Adventure
Tourism
Climate change is another big factor impacting
adventure tourism, especially in the winter
resorts. Sadly, we as a resort find ourselves
the most vulnerable to climate change and its
negative effects. As a result, we take action in
order to prevent and ameliorate disruption by
identifying the challenges and developing coping
and adapting strategies to further develop
our business while attempting to mitigate any
contribution to climate change. As climate
change has a big impact on the snow, we were
forced to invest in a snow - making system. Last
year the main investment in Resort Mavrovo was
the installation of the snow-making system along
the two kilometer long ski trail “Korja,” which cost
1 million Euros. “With 9 powerful snowguns and
4 giraffe snow sticks the skiing season will be
longer by 30%. The resort continued to surprise
its visitors by investing 600.000 Euros in the
second-by-length slope with the snow - making
system. This will guarantee more snow during
the winter on the lower parts of the mountain and
will automatically bring more tourists and longer
skiing season,” said Ognjan Cigovski, CEO of
Resort Mavrovo.
8
EMERGING MACEDONIA
Support of Local Businesses
We are aware of the brain drain and its impact
on the economy, especially on the small and
medium businesses in our country. Migration
of highly skilled workers to more developed
countries is one of the biggest challenges the
whole region faces. To deal with the problem, our
company, in cooperation with an external agency,
is conducting trainings and education for young
generations in various fields such as customer
service and customer care, hospitality and
gastronomy. As mentioned previously, adventure
tourism as an industry is still not the selling point
of our country as a result of the lack of support of
the government. Therefore, we put in effort to help
the local businesses with our very own initiative,
Nashe Mavrovo a semi annual magazine in three
languages (Macedonian, Albanian and English).
Our magazine supports the local businesses by
promoting them to a big number of audience
printing more than 6,000 copies every six months.
Adventure as a way of travel is rapidly attracting
consumers and has a huge economic benefit. We
are positioning our marketing almost exclusively
towards adventure travelers. In general, this kind
of travel is gaining favor among the travelers mainly
because it promotes health and physical activity
and allows cultural exchange with different people
of different nationalities. Adventure travel is also
most often viewed as a guilt - free vacation, given
that the money spent penetrates more and more
deeply into communities, contributing to the local
economy. In this vein, adventure tourism focuses
on the triple bottom line - people, planet and
profit.