Currently, there are 240 registered, licensed tour operators in Lithuania – 98 of them only have inbound tourism license, 18 – local tourism license, and the other 112 – inbound, outbound and local tourism licenses53. 2015-2019 the share of tourists who used the services of travel agencies and tour operators from the total number of all the number of arriving tourists decreased every year, although the number of participants in organised tourist trips in 2019 was 17% higher than in 2015.
Formation of Lithuanian tourism development strategy. The strategy would provide a clear and unified vision in which directions the entire Lithuanian tourism sector should move. Priority tourism directions and markets should be indicated in the strategy and tools for the implementation of the intended priorities. The strategy should also name the paths taken today’s most pressing problems of the sector are addressed. The strategy must be clear and easily measurable success indicators that would periodically allow to assess the progress of the implementation of the goals and objectives set out in the strategy. A unified and publicly available strategy would help coordinate actions between various stakeholders.
Formation of the investment environment – the most important role of state institutions is to form a legal base favourable to the development of tourism and the activities of tourism business entities. Designation of travel organization services provided to foreign tourists by companies registered in Lithuania as exportable services specified in the Law on Tourism should be considered an important factor. The success of the tourism business, and thus the scale of investment, will be largely determined by the measures implemented by the state in visa matters, i.e. i.e. to what extent the state will create favourable conditions for the sale of tourism services to foreign tourists, as well as how restrictions on this activity and bureaucratic barriers will be removed, how effectively municipalities and counties will solve the issues of development of tourism activities.
Means and priorities – to promote tourism business, the functions performed and financed by counties and municipalities should be: research and preparation of regional tourism development programs (projects) and detailed plans; maintenance of county and municipal tourism information centres and preparation of tourism publications; creation of a favourable investment environment for the business of tourism services, eliminating and reducing the influence of side factors (restrictions and formalities of establishment, reasonableness and competence of various permits and coordination requirements, organization of land and premises lease and privatization, operational efficiency of bureaucratic work). It is better to coordinate and reduce bureaucratic work.
According to experts, the culture of competition rather than cooperation prevails in Lithuania. Every interested party is inclined “get” more than “give” and seek to maximize their individual benefits in the short term. Such a culture does not allow us to use the existing potential and make sustainable decisions promptly. In not rare cases, cooperation is understood as formal coordination or inclusion, lack of openness to different opinions, the ability to combine them and search for the best possible solution instead of the local optimum. In the field of tourism, interest is strongly associated with direct (often financial) incentives, which leads to low integration and worse results than they could be (for example, a specific cultural object is renovated by private initiative and/or using EU funds, but access to it is not managed, while not achieving the maximum benefit and potential visitor traffic).
