|
Matthew Vella
The Malta Tourism Authority’s new booking site has fallen out of favour just days after being launched, with a riling business community putting to paid chairman Sam Mifsud’s assurances the new site enjoyed the blessing of tour operators.
The Federated Association of Travel and Tourism Agents (FATTA) has informed its members it will be reporting the MTA to the Office of Fair Trading and present a judicial complaint over the authority’s controversial decision to open a private company that will take internet bookings.
The action follows the judicial protest presented by Inspire Limited director Jonathan Shaw, who runs choosemalta.com, claiming the MTA was abusing its position as regulator and entering into direct competition with the private sector.
Yesterday the Chamber of Commerce’s leisure and tourism economic group (LTEG), lambasted MTA’s decision to take bookings through its company Visitmalta Ltd. “It is like having the Malta Transport Authority offering a taxi service, or the Malta Financial Services Authority opening an insurance company. This is a very serious precedent,” the LTEG said, adding that its request to discuss the matter with the MTA had received no acknowledgement. “The Group has already stated publicly that this web-portal should operate by having a direct link with the websites of all licensed travel agents.”
Inspire director Jonathan Shaw accused the MTA of a conflict of interest: “The MTA cannot be a regulator of the private sector and at the same time compete in the market as a private regulator. A regulator can never be a licence holder, but plays the role of an independent entity between government and private enterprise.”
And Labour’s shadow minister for tourism Evarist Bartolo yesterday branded the MTA “pathetic” for failing to foresee this outcome. “Minister Francis Zammit Dimech paints this portal as some sort of salvation for the industry when there are already websites taking internet bookings. It will take more than a website to save tourism.
“This is not the way to operate – we should be thinking of private-public partnerships and not having the regulator entering in competition with the private sector.”
FATTA’s protest has also put paid to MTA chairman Sam Mifsud’s claim with sister newspaper Business Today last Wednesday that the portal had the blessing of the federation. According to president Iain Tonna the federation always told the MTA it had its doubts on the legality of operating such a company. “We always contested it, and we were told that whether we liked it or not, it was a commitment made by the Prime Minister from which there was no going back.”
This week the FATTA council informed its members, which includes Sam Mifsud’s own travel agency S.Mifsud & Sons (SMS), that the authority’s new private endeavour constituted a breach of competition laws. “It is irregular that the MTA, as industry regulator, is also acting as an industry player in competition with some of its very own contributing stakeholders.”
Yesterday, MTA chairman Sam Mifsud said he had not been informed of FATTA’s official position but queried why the federation was protesting after having attended discussions on the portal and attended its launch. “As far as I’m concerned, FATTA are on board because they agreed with it. They did not object.”
Asked about how could the MTA as regulator enter into direct competition with the same players it licensed, Mifsud said the MTA’s portal will be offering every single hotel in Malta to be advertised on the website.
But the Chamber of Commerce’s LTEG yesterday criticised the fact the booking engine had a large number of its online facilities not operational and that hotel results were returning full bookings for February and March.
Sam Mifsud replied that the website had only just been launched. “When we launched the website we said this was a start and that we had a lot of work left to do. We wanted hotels to push themselves into joining the booking engine from now, otherwise the site would have been ready in three months’ time. We started with two hotels, now we have 15 and every day we’re updating them.”
Nationalist MP Robert Arrigo, a hotelier and handling agent, yesterday told MaltaToday he disagreed with anything that could take clients from foreign operators and handling agents in Malta. He had told parliament in November that the web portal should be informative only. “These companies employ a lot of people here.”
mvella@mediatoday.com.mt
|
