Now what? | Clayton Bartolo

For our tourism sector, 2019 was an all-time record-breaking year on all fronts. Then the pandemic struck and the rest is a horrible history we all lived through. Now - with the pandemic almost fully contained and travel back in overdrive - is a good time to see where we stand compared to the time before it struck its devastating blow.

The figures show that our performance in the first quarter of this year overtakes that of the same period in 2019 which was an all-time record. The number of inbound tourists (exc. overnight cruise liner passengers) increased by 4%, bed nights increased by 3.8% and the spend on the latter went up by 10.5%. Moreover, the total tourist spend rose from €272 million in 2019 to €312 million this year. That’s €40 million more injected into our economy in three months compared to the pre-covid all-time record.

Clearly, our strategy is working, our teamwork is functioning and with everyone’s help we are delivering. Poignantly, given that we are talking about January, February and March, the figures confirm our hunch that we can beat seasonality once and for all. Spreading tourist arrivals means spreading load on our infrastructure.

All good, but now what? The answer is that we must continue to push the envelope.

Our top priority should be sustainability because it is a necessity, not a choice. In the ever-changing tourism world, with competition becoming ever fiercer, we face challenges that we need to turn into opportunities. To continue to do so we must remain fully committed to improving our practices across the board, fully convinced that the tourists of tomorrow will be more discerning than ever.

We must also train a keen eye on diversification and on targeting niche markets with a view to spreading numbers all year round. In certain areas we are already making significant breakthroughs. Take sports tourism as an example. According to provisional statistics, in the first three months of this year sports events generated almost 18,000 bed nights. Clearly, we need to smartly pursue the myriad opportunities in other sectors.

We are looking ahead to cross new frontiers in this industry, like more events and of wider range – music, sports, audio-visual, festivals, and more. In parallel, we are also assiduously exploring emerging phenomena like flexcation - a longer stay mixing remote work and leisure. With our 300 days of sunshine this is truly a window to massive opportunities.

These are the sort of paths that take us to the future we as well as our visitors desire.

Finally, none of this is possible unless we continue to make it easier for tourists to fly to Malta. Through both a viable legacy airline as well as budget ones we must increase both routes and flight frequency.

Our tourism vision and strategy are on the right track as the results we’re obtaining amply prove. Let us continue to persevere, to glimpse what lies beyond the horizon and always mindful what needs to be preserve for our benefit, that of our visitors and that of the next generations.