Success in tourism in spite of difficult year - de Marco

2011 will close with a six per cent increase in tourist arrivals over 2010 which had already seen a 13 per cent increase on the previous year. A total of 1,357,971 people visited Malta by the end of November and the 1.4 million benchmark will be reached by the end of the year.

Addressing a news conference this morning, Tourism Parliamentary Secretary Mario de Marco said that this year's positive results were achieved in spite of a difficult year for the industry.

Next year was expected to be another difficult year especially because of issues that affected Malta's source markets, including austerity measures.

The outlook for the tourism industry in Europe was moderate, in the range of two to three per cent growth.

On the local front, the restructuring of Air Malta and the issue of accessibility will remain the most pressing challenges for 2012, he said.

Dr de Marco mentioned as an example the decision by Ryanair to ground 75 of its aircraft this winter across Europe.

He noted that a new flight connection between Toulouse and Malta, starting in April, as well as increased frequency by Lufthansa from Munich and Frankfurt, as well as flights by Air Berlin from Stuttgart, Nuremburg, Cologne and Munich will increase seat capacity to Malta.

At the beginning of next year the tourism ministry will be launching its 2012-2016 tourism plan which builds on the previous one which covered 2007 to 2011.

The new plan specifies what actions are to be implemented in the next five years and will be launched for public consultation in the beginning of next year.

The NSO figures for this year show that that 75,000 more tourists than last year had visited Malta.

NSO statistics for January to November showed that tourist arrivals had already acceded the total number of tourists in all of last year by over 22,000.

Tourist guest nights reached 11.6 million, an increase of 4.1 per cent over 2010 or 460,000 bed nights more.

The average length of stay went down in line with international trends went down from 9.5 nights in 2006 to 8.2 nights in 2011.

Statistics also show that between January and August Malta classified second in hotel occupancy rates in Europe.

In terms of tourist expenditure, there was an increase of more than €112 million over 2010, reaching a global figure of €1.2 billion worth of expenditure generated by tourism activity.

While there was a 14 per cent increase in expenditure on tourism packages there was also a 12 per cent increase in other expenditure.

There was a 3.6 per cent drop in seat capacity between April and October but a 5.4 per cent increase in passenger movement.

Dr de Marco said this was because MTA focused its marketing campaigns on increasing the load factor of airlines flying to Malta.

While in 2006 Malta had direct scheduled flights with 45 airports, last year it had 74.

Last year saw a 5.7 per cent increase of arrivals from the UK market and a drop of 6.4 per cent from the Italian market.

Interestingly, while in 2006 only 778 Israelis visited Malta, the number went up to nearly 28,500 - a 3,554 per cent increase this year.

Dr de Marco said that the MTA had pounced on the troubled situation between Turkey and Israel enticing Israelis to choose Malta as their holiday destination in view of the conflict with Turkey.

This year was also a record one for the cruise business with 557,000 passengers coming to Malta, an increase of 13.4 per cent over 2010. Cruise passengers did not reflect on the total tourist arrival figures.

This increase was despite the cancellation of two calls by cruise ships this week because of the weather. These could have possibly brought over another 7,200 passengers.

With an average expenditure of €60 per person, this industry will approximately generate just over €33 million in 2011.

Dr de Marco said the government was focusing on upgrading the product Malta offered tourists in terms of infrastructure, heritage and tourism establishments.

He mentioned as examples the investment in Valletta, Mdina and the three cities, the investment on heritage sites and embellishment in resort towns.