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Karl Schembri
The tour service taking visitors from the Hagar Qim temples to the historic streets of Cottonera on a traditional Malta bus was scrapped for good a week ago after thousands of liri were invested by government.
Launched less than 17 months ago by Tourism Minister Francis Zammit Dimech and then Transport Minister Censu Galea, the service was terminated Saturday 16 April after both ministries lost interest in what seems to be an unplanned state tourism venture gone wrong. There are no plans to offer the service again during the peak summer season.
The service, with day tickets costing Lm2, was meant to connect historical attractions across the island along a tourist route on board one of the few remaining old Malta buses.
The Transport Authority and the Tourism Authority spent more than Lm30,000 on funding and marketing the service in its first four months. The service was also called the VisitMalta bus and was operated by the Public Transport Association.
“Visitors will now be able to board a VisitMalta bus at Sliema, St Julian’s, Qawra and Bugibba and within a few minutes they will be admiring the temples of Hagar Qim or exploring the historic streets of Cottonera,” a beaming Zammit Dimech told the media during the inauguration press conference in December 2003. “For these trips, tourists will use the Malta bus – a mode of transport which has become an attraction in its own right” – but which is now on its way to extinction as more than 100 old buses are being scrapped.
The tourism authority had predicted that the VisitMalta service “is bound to be a success in the future” but now that it has been unceremoniously stopped a spokesperson redirected “any queries regarding the cancellation of this service… to the ADT (Transport Authority).”
“The VisitMalta Tourist service was taken over by and is officially in the hands of the Awtorita` Dwar it-Trasport (ADT) and the Assocjazzjoni tat-Trasport Publiku (ATP),” spokesperson Coryse Naudi said. “The Tourism Authority was involved at an initial stage and offered support in the form of the initial planning of the route, design of the booklet and the promotion of the service. Following this initial support the MTA kept a monitoring role and assisted the service by making VisitMalta leaflets available in Tourist Information Offices. Today the ATP and ADT have taken over the service.”
Transport Authority spokesperson Daniela Borg Mizzi said the authority had stopped the service earlier this month.
“The ADT had informed both MTA and ATP in March that it will not continue with the current VisitMalta bus service permit and thus will allow MTA/ATP to operate it until its expiry date which was the 16 April,” she said.
Neither of the two spokespersons provided the reasons for the termination of the service.
In reply to MaltaToday’s questions, Borg Mizzi wrote a cryptic message: “ADT has recommended both to the ATP and MTA that it was ready to review the possibility to sign a fresh agreement for a VisitMalta bus service on the condition that all the key tourism stakeholders are effectively part and parcel of any new proposal whereby the correct professional manner of running the service is guaranteed and its marketing and promotion is properly in place.”
Borg Mizzi’s remarks about “the correct professional manner of running the service” seem to be a dig at the Public Transport Association, but her reference to “marketing and promotion” being “properly in place” seems to point at the tourism authority, which forked out Lm14,000 for “brochures and other assistance” during the first four months of service.
The figures were announced in parliament by Zammit Dimech in reply to persistent parliamentary questions put by Nationalist MP Robert Arrigo, himself having personal financial interests in tourism and transport ventures that were in competition with the new service.
The tourism minister had assured Arrigo that the MTA would not be financing the service in the long term, nor would the transport authority. He said he estimated that in 2004 the service would have been used by 35,000 to 40,000 tourists.
Neither Naudi nor Borg Mizzi answered questions about fierce lobbying by commercial interests to stop the service – a claim made in no uncertain terms by the President of the Public Transport Association, Victor Spiteri.
“There was huge pressure from the unscheduled bus service to stop this tourist attraction, and there were lots of conflicts of interests involved,” Spiteri told MaltaToday. “The authority doesn’t want the service to work, and they ignored all our recommendations to amend the route and make it start from Bugibba, where lots of tourists would be residing in nearby hotels. But they wanted the service to fail, and it did, because once they stopped funding it we could not absorb all the costs. Now the transport authority has stopped us from operating it.”
Spiteri said his association had plans to make the route profitable but the authority did not accept them.
“We can offer an improved service without any subsidies whatsoever and make a profit, thereby reducing the overall government subsidies to the public transport association, but the transport authority is not interested,” Spiteri said. “Even though our bus service is in demand and tourists are enthusiastic, we are actually penalised for accommodating them.”
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