Skiing on Maghtab

Turning Maghtab into a skiing resort, supplying camels for rides on Comino, building facilities for mountaineers on Ta' Ghammar in Gozo... should these new ideas have been included in the Labour Party's action plan to innovate tourism in Malta and Gozo to satisfy those who are expecting new ideas to bring about recovery and growth in tourism?

A review of contemporary studies on how to promote innovation in tourism acknowledges that governments have no magic wand or unique and original formulae to renew tourism? But both the Tourism Committee of the OECD and the World Tourism and Travel Council (WTTC) agree that dynamic and proactive governments can take a lot of well thought-out small steps that incrementally can create the right environment for tourism to thrive.

In its proposals to renew tourism in Malta and Gozo, the Labour Party has also been inspired by the philosophy of the OECD Tourism Committee and the WTTC. In its 'Blueprint for a new tourism' the WTTC recommends that governments should recognise travel and tourism as a top priority; business should balance economics with people, culture and the environment and that governments, social partners and civil society should work hand in hand in tourism with a shared pursuit of long term growth and prosperity.

WTTC identifies the local conditions that inhibit tourism growth - everything from incoherence in planning to discouragement through taxation, and from obstacles to business to a lack of training support.

Governments have it within their power to unlock the industry's potential to create jobs and generate prosperity.

The Labour Party has modelled its action plan to revive tourism in Malta and Gozo on the WTTC 'Blueprint for a new tourism' "recognising travel and tourism's valuable flow-through effects for all sectors of the economy and population - and having the sense of leadership to act on that recognition. Leadership should factor travel and tourism into all policies and decision-making; leadership at the highest levels of government should co-ordinate strategy impacting on travel and tourism, and should reorganise structures and funding so as to ensure effective planning and management."

The Labour Party also followed the recommendations of the OECD Tourism Committee on government's role to promote tourism by providing strategic leadership, creating the right economic, fiscal and administrative environment for tourism growth and supporting innovation of tourism products and services supplied by the private sector and civil society through financial incentives and by funding research and development on tourism innovation.

Labour's action plan calls for a national tourism strategy that we still lack and which the government is refusing to draw up. All the players involved in tourism should participate in shaping this national tourism strategy. We should stop wasting time and energies on partisan skirmishes and both the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party should get together and collaborate and agree on a national tourism strategy as had been done so successfully in the case of financial services.

Even if both parties agree to work together on this national tourism strategy it will not be easy to put together as the tourism sector is made up of many different players with their own segmental interest. The sum of the parts does not form automatically a whole. This is where strategic leadership comes in: the ability to listen to the views of all the sectors and then to filter out and decide what is in the national interest as opposed to the particular sectoral interest. The same kind of strategic leadership is required when it comes to implementing the strategy to ensure that government private sector, social partners and civil society work hand in hand.

Another key proposal in the Labour action plan is to review the level of taxation on operators in the sector. Unfortunately, over the last few years, taxation on the tourist sector has been used solely as a revenue generator for Government as if Malta exists in a vacuum and other competing destinations do not exist. Whenever Government decided to impose a surcharge or a tax on this sector it has never carried out a comparative impact assessment with other destinations. A Labour government is committing itself to use taxation not only as a means of generating revenue for government but also as a competitive tool to be able to compete effectively with other destinations.

Another Labour proposal is to remove obstacles to tourism growth created by bad administration. We are doing fairly well in the sector of the teaching of English as a foreign language. We can do much better if Government uses the visa procedure as a competitive tool. Government cannot simply allow the police to dictate who comes from which country and how many. Smugglers of humans should not be allowed to use us to traffic people across borders but our visa procedures should at least match the efficiency and parameters of procedures adopted by the UK and Ireland.

Why are we turning away thousands of Chinese students and others from Latin America and the Gulf area as if we don't want more people from non-EU countries to come here and learn English? We need to have a speedy issuance of visas to encourage more foreigners to come here and learn English.

Inspiration and perspiration

Labour's action plan is also very clear on low-cost airlines. We cannot afford not to have them operate here. Before deciding to travel people also take note of the cost to reach their destination so if getting to Malta remains more expensive than going to other destinations, travellers will simply go to other destinations.

But we must not allow low-cost airlines to cannibalise existing airlines. We should attract some of the 54 or so different small low-cost airlines operating in Europe and not let one giant come here and take over. It would be wrong because we risk becoming dependent on just one airline at the expense of losing established carriers.

We cannot allow ourselves to get into a situation where an airline would start dictating to us what it wants. What we need to do is look at what low-cost airlines want, consider careful their needs, balance them with our national interests and see how best we can facilitate air access to our islands through them and all the other existing airlines and tour operators that already bring us tourists. Low-cost airlines will come here as long as the route is profitable and if we as a country can guarantee the numbers. This is why it is important to get more tourists all year round.

Labour also has a very concrete proposal on how to improve air access to Gozo. We can only ensure a viable helicopter service between the islands if we subsidise it and make it viable for the operators and affordable for the passengers. In so doing we will only be imitating what the French, Spanish and Greeks are doing to overcome the insularity of small islands. The present situation is unacceptable. Many flights are being cancelled. It is not fair to fly over from London with a ticket in hand for a helicopter flight to Gozo and upon arrival at Gudja at 2 a.m. you are told the flight has been cancelled.

While revitalising Malta's tourism links with the UK, Germany, France, Italy and other European countries and ensuring that we are offering the products and services their travellers are ready to pay for, Labour's action plan sets out the need to tap new markets that are emerging as the main growth tourism markets, among them China, India, Brazil and Russia. Other competing destinations have set up task forces focused on breaking into these markets. France has been working hard for the last five years to attract Chinese tourists and will soon have a million Chinese tourists visiting Paris every year.

We are lagging behind in this area and have not even started putting our act together. Tourists from these new markets have much more money to spend than tourists from Europe as European economic growth is very weak compared to growth rates in Asia.

Reviving our tourism, achieving stronger growth and generating more wealth, employment and new investment is not going to be easy. Apart from new ideas we also need a new way of doing things. But most of all we need to work hard to give tourists more than they expect: a warm welcome, fair prices, positive experiences, a clean country, efficient services, good roads...

To achieve all this there is no magic wand or miraculous way forward. We need to work hard. After all, even one of the greatest inventors who has shaped our century with his new ideas, said that genius is "one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration." However new a national tourism policy is on paper, what counts ultimately is our readiness to work hard and perspire, perspire, perspire to make it happen, knowing full well that we are operating in a very dynamic environment.

evaristbartolo@hotmail.com