Every travel story about a destination passes through a filter that almost none of them name: the local guide. Who trains that guide, who licenses them, and who decides what they may say out loud is the quiet machinery behind an enormous amount of what the world reads about a place. On 3 September 2026, the School of Travel Journalism opened that machinery to our Master in Travel Journalism students in a masterclass with Enes Toska — licensed national tourist guide, trainer certified by the European Federation of Tourist Guide Associations (FEG), and co-founder of GUIDEKS, the Kosovo Tourist Guides Association. As I noted in my introduction, our guest “isn’t here to sell you a destination; he builds the institutions that decide how one gets planned.”
Kosovo: a destination “restarted from zero”
For most of our students, the word “Kosovo” first summoned only one thing — war. That reflex is precisely the professional problem Toska works against. The conflict ended in 1999 and independence came in 2008; today, he reminded us, “war is a very distant memory,” and the country “restarted from zero, from scratch,” building institutions while tourism remained, for years, a low priority. The trajectory is nonetheless striking: from 44,294 visitors in 2008 to 698,068 in 2024, in Europe’s youngest country, home to four UNESCO World Heritage Sites, Ottoman old towns, the Sharr Mountains and Rugova Canyon, the wine region of Rahovec, and a café culture once crowned, by Yahoo Travel, as home to the world’s best macchiato.
GUIDEKS: building a profession in a post-conflict society
The heart of the session — and the reason it deserves recognition well beyond our classroom — was the story of building a profession where none was formally defined. “Building a new institution or an association from zero,” Toska observed, “is not the easiest job in a post-conflict society.” Founded in 2018 by eight guides, GUIDEKS today counts 167 members; it is Kosovo’s only national member of FEG and the World Federation of Tourist Guide Associations (WFTGA), and in 2026 it was accredited by the National Qualifications Authority as the only body authorised to qualify national and local tourist guides in the country. That is not merely administrative housekeeping. In an emerging destination, standardised, ethically trained guides are the infrastructure of credibility — the difference between a country that is narrated with care and one that is narrated by rumour. GUIDEKS’s work, carried out with international development support and sustained by a community of guides across Kosovo’s municipalities, is a model of how professionalisation underwrites responsible tourism.
Responsible storytelling and the ethics of difficult heritage
Toska’s most demanding material concerned what he calls responsible destination storytelling, and the “dark tourism” that draws many visitors to sites of conflict and loss. His formulation was memorably clear: at a memorial to the Kosovo Liberation Army, “for the local people, they were the heroes, but for the Serbian government, they were the terrorists — the same site, two different sides of the story.” The guide’s duty, he argued, is neither to erase nor to arbitrate: “We don’t have the right to change the history, we don’t have the right to change the narratives, but at least we need to give the reflection of different sides.” Responsible storytelling, in his words, “puts people before the attractions,” so that “victims and communities should not become merely tourism products.” He distilled the practice into five rules: verify before you narrate; separate fact from interpretation; give context rather than isolated dates; acknowledge contested narratives; let local voices be part of the story; and defined the guide, finally, as “a mediator between the visitor, the historical event and the local community.”
What our students saw: the travel journalist’s role
We asked students to file a conference report as working journalists, and their reflections sharpened the session’s central lesson. Marina Zastrogina reframed the whole talk as a single question — “Who gets to tell Kosovo’s story?” — and drew the distinction that should hang over any post-conflict destination: “responsible storytelling is not the same as positive storytelling.” Several students turned the same critical lens on the speaker himself, exactly as the profession requires: as Adina Dumitrescu wrote, an account from a co-founder “is not a neutral witness to whether that structure works.” From a gastronomic angle, Elli Geniatakis identified the guide as the “invisible middleman” who “decides which wineries visitors see, which food traditions are explained, and which local producers earn an income.” And Louise Davies located the real test of the destination: whether visitors, “after they have heard about it, leave remembering something else.”
Why this matters for travel and gastronomic journalism
Here is the through-line for anyone who writes about places. The guide is the first interpreter a journalist meets, and the machinery that trains that guide — an association like GUIDEKS, a certification standard like FEG’s — shapes which histories, which monasteries and mosques, which food traditions become visible, and which stay off the page. To report responsibly on an emerging destination is to ask who trained the guide, whose narrative is being offered, and what a search engine cannot tell you. Our gratitude goes to Enes Toska and to GUIDEKS for a masterclass in doing exactly that — and for demonstrating that in a young destination, telling the truth well is not the opposite of hospitality but its highest form.
The School of Travel Journalism thanks Enes Toska and GUIDEKS (guideks.org). This masterclass is part of our Master in Travel Journalism: learn more about responsible storytelling and destination reporting there and in our Master in Gastronomic Journalism and Communication.
