In the first half of this year 12,000 fewer tourists visited our islands and spent Lm2 million less than last year. Obviously, the government's target to attract 70,000 more tourists will be missed miserably. While the number of tourists and the income from them continue to drop here, other countries like Spain, Italy and Greece, that also passed through a period of decline as tourists destinations, have now rejuvenated and reinvented themselves and are enjoying growth of over six per cent so far this year.
To give the impression it is addressing this crisis, over the last few weeks the government hastened to put together two documents about the strategic way forward to revive tourism.
The crisis has become so serious that no amount of cosmetics will hide the serious difficulties we are facing. We need serious surgery to give a new lease of life to our tourism industry and the government is doing nothing of substance to come to grips with the situation. We need more than branding, advertising and low-cost airlines to revive our tourism. Branding will not work if it is nothing more than just creating a new glossy wrapper for an inferior product. We need a holistic plan of action to make the country a nicer and satisfying experience for those who live in it and visit it.
We need more effective advertising. But even advertising is not enough if we do not deliver what we promise as a country.
We also need to reverse the decision taken to close down the overseas offices of the Malta Tourism Authority (MTA). Not that these offices will automatically guarantee more tourists visiting us. After all, so far we have had a decline from the British market, where the MTA's office is still open while more Italian tourists came to Malta this year despite the fact that the MTA office in Milan was closed down. So while using our embassies in our core markets to promote Malta and Gozo effectively, we need to do more than better advertising and promotion, improve travelling to Malta and make it more affordable we have to ensure that the country is looking good, the prices we charge are right and the service we give is warm and efficient.
We need to regain our competitiveness in quality and price to be able to start growing again. We face fierce competition from thousands of other destinations in the whole world, in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean where tourism is growing by four to five per cent.
We must make full use of one of the few advantages of the smallness of our country and plan and manage tourism in an integrated and coordinated way. But this will not happen through some extraterrestrial initiative. The government needs to show the necessary will and energetic leadership to mobilise the whole country to commit itself wholeheartedly to revive our tourism industry. Parts of our industry are working hard to change and adapt themselves to provide what tourists want today. Others are not managing to do this and we need to help them provide what tourists want in the first decade of the 21st century and not what the tourists wanted in the latter half of the 20th century when the Mediterranean started attracting millions of package holiday makers in search of the sun, sea and sand.
We need to rejuvenate the tourism industry by drawing up a national strategic plan for Malta and Gozo, made up of strategic action plans for the different types of those we want to attract: English language students, divers, sea, leisure and heritage lovers, conference and incentives... We must understand the tastes of tourists of different ages, genders, nationalities, socio-economic profile and cater for them. We are not doing this effectively enough as a country.
But while working on such a mid- and long-term strategic plan to reinvent ourselves as a tourist destination, the government needs urgently to draw up, together with all the stakeholders, an emergency plan of action for the short term to address the painful decline in tourist numbers and expenditure.
The government is showing no sign of urgency and wants to plod ahead with the complacent attitude of "business as usual". The serious situation we are facing demands a sense of urgency and whole-hearted commitment which the government is totally lacking.
Mr Bartolo is a Labour member of Parliament.
evaristbartolo@hotmail.com