Corinthia Group seeks extra floors on St George’s Bay hotels

The Planning Authority will decide on 29 January on three separate applications from the Corinthia Group to add more floors to its three hotels in St George’s Bay.

The company wants to add two extra floors to  the Marina Hotel, Radisson Blu Resort and Corinthia San Gorg.

If approved, this would increase the number of hotel rooms in one of Malta’s busiest tourist areas by 250. The Development and Management Directorate has recommended that all three applications be approved.

While each application is being assessed individually, all three rely on the same policy justification and are justified through similar arguments on visual impact, traffic and tourism priorities.

Central to the Directorate’s reasoning is the claim that the surrounding context has already been “heavily committed” to high-rise development. The case officer reports repeatedly cite nearby towers such as the db Group development, Mercury Tower, the Hilton Hotel tower and other tall buildings in Paceville as evidence that the skyline has already absorbed substantial vertical growth. In this context, the additional floors are presented as visually subordinate rather than dominant.

The first proposal concerns the Radisson Blu Resort at St George’s Bay, where Baypoint Hotels Limited is seeking outline permission to increase the hotel from five to seven storeys. The extension would add 74 rooms, raising the hotel’s capacity from 257 to 331 rooms, through an additional 6,599 square metres of gross floor area created by covering existing terraces and constructing two new upper floors.

The second application concerns the Marina Hotel within the Corinthia Beach Resort complex. Here, the developer is proposing two extra floors that would increase the hotel’s capacity by 101 rooms, from 200 to 301, alongside 6,058 square metres of additional gross floor area.

The third proposal involves the Corinthia St George’s Bay Hotel itself, where a similar two-storey extension would add 77 rooms, raising capacity from 248 to 325 rooms.

All three sites fall within designated Resort Zones under the North Harbour Local Plan, which formally adopts a restrictive approach to building heights. However, in each case, the Planning Authority’s Development Management Directorate has recommended approval in principle, arguing that the developments qualify for exceptions under the Height Limitation Adjustment Policy for Hotels. This policy allows additional height for hotel developments in urban and tourism areas, provided that the added floors are tied strictly to tourism use.

Photomontages submitted by the applicants have been used to support the conclusion that the added height would not significantly alter the skyline when viewed from key public vantage points. In all three cases, the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage ultimately raised no objection, despite the proximity of scheduled heritage assets such as the Torri ta’ San Ġorġ, citing the intensely urbanised setting.

Traffic and infrastructure impacts were also assessed in broadly similar terms across the three applications. Infrastructure Malta did not require site-specific transport impact assessments, pointing instead to wider “holistic” transport studies for the Paceville and St Julian’s area.

Parking provision was deemed adequate, allowing the Directorate to conclude that the developments would not generate unacceptable traffic impacts on their own.

Environmental concerns, including potential impacts on the nearby Natura 2000 coastal site, were dismissed on the basis that all three proposals are confined to existing footprints, with no extension towards the shoreline. The Environment and Resources Authority concluded that no significant environmental impacts were likely, subject to standard construction management conditions.

One of the few formal objections came from Din l-Art Ħelwa in relation to the Marina Hotel proposal. The NGO warned that the cumulative effect of multiple hotel expansions in St George’s Bay would exacerbate congestion, strain infrastructure and further erode the area’s environmental quality.

However, these concerns were effectively neutralised in the case officer report, which argued that cumulative impacts were being addressed through wider transport planning and that the individual proposal complied with existing policy frameworks.

In all three applications the applicant will have to sign a binding tripartite agreement with the Planning Authority and the Malta Tourism Authority which would legally tie the additional floors to hotel use only, explicitly prohibiting conversion to residential apartments or other non-tourism uses.

All three applications are for outline development permission. This means that, even if approved on 29 January, no construction can commence until full development applications are submitted and approved, covering detailed architectural design and landscaping. Nonetheless, outline approval would establish the principle of additional height and capacity, significantly narrowing the scope for refusal at a later stage.