I was interviewing Danske Bank chief analyst Lars Christensen on Oct. 27 about Lithuania’s gross domestic product in the third quarter, when he told me he thought that instead of stimulating the construction industry the Lithuanian government should instead focus on exports.

I’m not sure if exports are the ticket. While some the country’s usual export markets like Germany are recovering, demand is still relatively weak in most.

What about tourism? It’s certainly helping other parts of Europe. But despite the European Capital of Culture designation Vilnius received this year, tourism is down by a third according to the Lithuanian Hotel and Restaurant Association.

Obviously the world economic crisis is a culprit, but the level of decline cannot be blamed fully on the down economy, though. According to the European Travel Commission, the Lithuania’s tourism decline is the third-worst in Europe, even though prices for rooms, restaurants and services have plummeted. Clearly Vilnius’ Old Town and other attractions haven’t burned down, and of course there’s the Capital of Culture events.

So why is the amount of incoming tourists dropping off like a civil war has broken out here? It isn’t happening elsewhere on the continent.

There’s the little things — some of the country’s most scenic parks are sodden with litter, the customer service is hit or miss and taxis tend to inexplicably charge foreigners more.

But that’s just being nit-picky. After all the customer service in Italy and France, two of the continent’s most-visited countries, often isn’t friendly and many of their cities are full of trash and graffiti, but that’s not the problem.

The collapse of national airline flyLAL and the failure to find an adequate replacement for it has consigned this year’s potential tourist draw to the dustbin preventing millions of euros from entering the country. That’s more money for desperately-needed jobs and tax revenue gone.

Tourists, especially during a recession as severe as the current one, don’t go to countries that are expensive and inconvenient to reach. And guess what — you can fly direct from Paris to Hanoi, Vietnam, but not to Vilnius.

I’ve been trying to book a ticket to the United States for Christmas to see my family, and the ticket from Vilnius to Chicago is several hundred dollars more than from Riga or Warsaw. In fact I had something out of the Twilight Zone happen when looking at LOT Polish Airlines.

I flew to Vilnius from Chicago in March 2007 on LOT, and the round-trip cost $714 (€484). That included stopover in Warsaw, and the final leg of the trip was actually on a flyLAL plane working codeshare with LOT.

Anyway with that trip’s reasonable price tag in mind, I went to LOT’s website last night and checked prices for a roundtrip around Christmas time. To roundtrip from Warsaw to Chicago was about $700 (€475). But to go from Vilnius to Chicago with LOT was listed as $5,500 (€3,700). Incredible.

A similar thing happened when I tried to go to Munich to visit my brother in early October. Roundtrip tickets from Warsaw to Munich were about €100, but from Vilnius to Munich were about €340.

The reason it costs more to fly here is because airport fees at Vilnius International have been among the highest in Europe and because few replacements for flyLAL’s forfeited routes have been found. Airlines that do service the Lithuanian capital  have little or no competition, so they can get away with charging more.

The airport and transport ministry need to get serious about replacing flyLAL if they ever hope to bring back that tourism money back. But so far the solutions have been only piecemeal.

In the meantime the country could try create something unique that would bring lots of people here regardless of the flight issue. Allow me to play devil’s advocate and brainstorm some solutions.

The Capital of Culture events didn’t work for tourism this year. Perhaps a high-profile music festival would. Serbia’s Novi Sad festival is one of the reasons its tourism bucked the trend and went up this year, not down. Denmark enjoys a large influx of tourists for Roskilde.

A few more reasonably-priced water parks would be a draw card. It certainly works for Wisconsin Dells in the U.S. Without tourism it would just be another rural village but now that a big chunk of suburban Illinois and Chicago makes the four-hour car drive up because they created enough attractions that are conducive for families with young children. This is something that can’t be said of many of Europe’s tourist areas, too — try taking a small child around Rome, for example.

The Finns, Swedes and Latvians already have a fine selection of water parks, but the Poles don’t, and as long as the prices were kept reasonable I think Lithuania could attract tourists this way. Of course once they were coming for water parks it could feed other family-friendly attractions and grow a tourism hub.

Another draw would be to offer something neither of Lithuania’s neighbors does. Here’s an example — what does the Netherlands have that Belgium and Luxembourg don’t?

While it may be an immodest proposal, drug tourism consistently brings money in. The Dutch tourism industry has suffered among the least in Europe during the last year. And would these types of tourists really be any worse than the sex tourists visiting the strip clubs and erotic massage parlors Vilnius is full of, or the gamblers heading to the many casinos?

Each of these disparate suggestions could bring other less welcome consequences and I don’t know if any of them are the answer. But thinking outside the box to solve the country’s dearth of tourism is.

Disclaimer:

Views expressed in the opinion section are never those of the Baltic Reports company or the website’s editorial team as a whole, but merely those of the individual writer.