Working together for solutions

The Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association cannot agree more with the contents of Monday's editorial of The Times.

Indeed, the Malta Tourism Authority can and should be doing much more with the budget it has at hand.

It is specifically due to this that the MHRA has, since May 2003, been calling for a full audit of the MTA's operation. The MHRA has questioned a number of areas of expenditure and emphasised on numerous occasions that the MTA has to make much better use of the money allocated to it.

The MHRA has requested a full human resource audit to establish whether the number of people employed by the authority is the correct number and it has questioned the type of marketing techniques being used.

The MHRA has also questioned the lack of focus of the authority on marketing due to the wide spread of responsibility allocated to the authority within the law in the areas of product planning, enforcement, human resource development and research, especially when other government institutions should be looking after these tasks as a support service to the MTA. The MHRA has also actively made concrete and constructive suggestions on how to go forward.

The MTA has now finally taken the bull by the horns and set up a focused team of four people who have been given the responsibility of deciding on the best way forward.

The objective of this team is to restructure the authority to enable it to work much more effectively and efficiently than it has in the past. The government was fully aware of this movement within the MTA and this is why the MHRA was so surprised at the government's action at this hour.

The decision to cut this year's funding by Lm500,000, which, as many may have noticed, has to be removed from the next seven months and is therefore equivalent to an annual cut of over Lm850,000, has taken the wind out of the committee's sails two weeks after it was christened.

Our appeal to the government is simple: Give this committee three months to come up with the new structure of MTA and give it the necessary time to implement it. If this is done more than Lm500,000 will be saved from the restructuring of the authority. Once this is done, then let the committee utilise these savings to go towards a redesigned marketing effort within a strategy which will be totally revamped from the destination-led strategy that has been used for reasons of tradition to a strategy that will be realigned on one that is market segment-driven.

Give the committee time to then align the industry, including Air Malta, MIA and all other stakeholders, to the same segment-driven strategy to ensure that everyone in the industry is working in unison, driving the same message to potential visitors.

This type of synergy will give us more than double the mileage for our marketing lira and go a long way to reviving our tourism industry.

The savings made, if re-invested in this way, will generate millions of liri for the Maltese economy through increased flow of visitors to our islands and go a long way to help solve the deficit problem.

We are all on the same side and we should be investing our energies in working together to find solutions.