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In 2006 tourism worldwide has grown by 3 to 4% as 10 million people more travelled than last year despite terrorism, avian flu, floods and the surge in the price of oil increasing airfares. In Malta Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi had promised a growth of 150,000 tourists between 2005 and 2007. The target has been missed for two years running. In the first 10 months of this year we had 1,006,214 people visiting us, a drop of 5.1 per cent over the comparable period last year. Total tourist expenditure from January to October is estimated at Lm384.5 million, a decrease of 1.6 per cent over the same period last year.
Addressing the 14th annual World Travel Monitor Forum in Pisa last Monday Tom Ylkanen, vice-chairman of the European Travel Commission’s (ETC) Market Intelligence Group, told delegates: “Europe is well on its way to achieving yet another year of positive growth.” The delegates identified the continuing expansion and spread of low-cost airlines across the region as an important factor that has stimulated demand “in many cases at the expense of destinations such as Cyprus and Malta, which have not benefited from low-cost airline services until now.”
In the coming year we will be able to see to what extent low-cost airlines will improve our performance in tourism. On their own they will not be enough for a strong recovery in our tourism and more serious measures are needed to rejuvenate out tourism and gear our islands for 21st century tourists. Government needs to put its act together in the Tourism Inter-Ministerial Committee led by the prime minister, show inspired leadership to bring a good working relationship between the Malta Tourism Authority and the private sector and mobilise the whole country to give tourists memorable experiences at the right price and quality.
While we lag behind in tourism, our neighbours in Europe and the Mediterranean continue to grow. Northern Europe, excluding the Baltic States, has been the strongest performer (+6.0%) in Europe, with Finland, Ireland and the UK leading the growth. Other destinations achieving growth rates well above average are Germany – thanks largely to its hosting of the FIFA World Cup – the Netherlands and Switzerland. The huge pent-up demand for Central and Eastern Europe over the past few years, for example, now seems to have largely bottomed out, although some countries in the region are continuing to perform well, ex. Slovakia, Latvia and Lithuania.
The Southern/Mediterranean Europe recorded a healthy 4.6% increase in arrivals through the first eight months of the year. The western region, notably Spain and Italy, benefited from the terrorist attacks in Turkey and the political and military tension caused by the Israel-Lebanon crisis. Malta failed to gain from this marked shift from the troubled eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Malta also failed to benefit from the strong recovery of the US and Japanese market. Italy and Germany were the main beneficiaries from the increasing numbers of Americans and Japanese who travelled to Europe. Slovakia and Slovenia have also seen massive growth in the number of Japanese spending their holidays in them.
Other European destinations are also doing well in cultivating emerging markets such as Russia, India and China. Europe is also looking forward to steady growth from most other parts of Asia like South Korea and leading markets in Latin America like Brazil over the short to medium-term. Our government has done practically nothing serious to enable our islands to break into these new markets. It will take years of hard work to catch up on the years that have been lost. “It is important to note that several of Europe’s leading source markets are mature ones,” said Rolf Freitag, President and founder of IPK International and the European and World Travel Monitors, at the Pisa Forum. “Since they are fast reaching a ceiling in terms of overall foreign travel intensity, any growth from these markets is due more to increases in trip frequency than to rising numbers of the population choosing to travel abroad.”
Our tourism cannot grow if we continue to cater only for yesterday’s European tourists who took holiday packages offered by tour operators for longer holidays. The vast majority of today’s European tourists travel to other European destinations on short trips of one to three nights. These travellers on short breaks rose by 10% as against zero growth for longer trips of four-plus nights – again, attributable to increased demand for low-cost/no-frills flights.
While catering more for these European tourists taking short breaks and gearing our industry’s facilities, marketing and air links for them, we also need to formulate and implement an action plan to attract the increasing number of non-European tourists that are travelling to Europe and passing us by.
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