Malta has scored a tourism hat trick, winning a prestigious destination award as statistics show all-time high visitor numbers in August and record passenger movements at the airport in September.
Tourism Minister Mario de Marco described the results as “definitely encouraging”.
“I think that the industry can be justifiably proud of itself in any circumstances but even more so given the current economic scenario which many of our source markets are currently facing,” he said.
The Malta Tourism Authority has won the Destination of the Year award at the 2012 Travel Trade Gazette Awards in London. The gazette is one of the travel trade’s leading voices and its annual awards are among the most important in the industry.
Collected by the MTA’s UK and Ireland director Alex Incorvaja, the award was presented at a ceremony in Leicester Square. It is given to that country’s tourist board which judges believe was most effective in engaging with the UK travel trade over the past 12 months.
Meanwhile, official statistics for August revealed a 4.4 per cent increase in tourists, to 199,430 – the highest number of visitors ever to visit Malta in a single month.
The figure comprised 174,817 holiday makers and another 6,514 business travelers.
The UK is still the main market for Malta’s tourists, at 27 per cent, followed by Italy, with 18 per cent.
Nearly 2.1 million tourist nights were spent in Malta in August, of which most were in hotels. Nights in private accommodation increased by 22 per cent while nights in hotels by two per cent.
The average length of stay was 10.5 nights – an increase of 0.5 nights when compared to August last year.
Total expenditure was estimated at €225.6 million – a healthy eight per cent growth over the same month in 2011.
To top it all, the airport recorded more than 407,900 airport passenger movements last month, a record for September and a 6.6 per cent rise over September of 2011. This was the sixth consecutive record month for the MIA.
Seat capacity increased by 3.6 per cent to more than 476,000 seats. Aircraft movements went up by 3.5 per cent while the average seat load factor rose to 85.7 per cent. Between January and September, passenger movements increased by 4.1 per cent when compared to the same period last year, to 2,896,724.
Dr de Marco said these results were an achievement for an industry that faced stiff competition from other destinations.
“It shows that our efforts to increase the number of routes to Malta and the investment made in marketing Malta more effectively has paid off. In fact this year, we had 81 scheduled direct routes to Malta as opposed to 57 in 2007,” he said.
He pointed out that all this was the result of “excellent cooperation between the stakeholders” and all those involved in the industry, which contributed close to 30 per cent of Malta’s GDP.
However, it was important not to become complacent, he cautioned. “This doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels as every year in tourism is different and challenging and I have no doubt that even the coming winter and next year will be a challenging year.
“We have to keep on investing if we want to have a viable and sustainable tourism industry in the long term.”
In a statement, the ministry said the Government was investing in capital and infrastructural projects that improved the tourism product including the Pembroke garden, St Paul’s Bay promenade, City Gate project, the Marsaxlokk seafront embellishment, and roads, among others.
There were several schemes that encouraged investment from the private sector to improve the tourism product and services including €10 million for sustainable tourism projects. This would create around 500 jobs in 100 projects amounting to about €20 million.