The Business Observer is this morning hosting a business breakfast to discuss whether we should be patting ourselves on the back merely because we set a new record for arrivals every year.

Months ago, Corinthia chairman Alfred Pisani challenged the notion and said that we should be going for quality rather than quantity – but his counterpart at the Fortina Hotel, Michael Zammit Tabone, is wary of taking what he sees as an elitist point of view which would exclude the ‘mass’ market that has served Malta so well for the past 50 years.

We do admittedly have a tendency to look at the 1.7 million tourists as an entity set in stone that we merely add a few hundred thousand to every year. That is far from the case. An impressive 31 per cent of visitors have been to Malta before – but the rest need to be convinced that they should come to this island and not to any of the other destinations vying for their annual leave, some of whom may never even have heard of Malta let alone have any preconceived idea of Product Malta.

Another aspect is whether we can continue to aim for growth. Is there a point at which Malta will need to put up a sign saying: “Sorry. Full up”?

University lecturer George Cassar created panic when he said that Malta could not sustain many more than 1.7 million arrivals. The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) published a report on the economic impact of tourism in Malta which raises some interesting points to ponder.

It forecasts, for example, that Malta could host 2.375 million tourists by 2024. Even if the island managed to spread those equally over the whole year, if they stayed for eight days each (the current average length of stay), then it means 52,000 extra people on the island each and every day, over a tenth of our population. Consider this in the context of 33,000 beds currently available in hotels.

The WTTC forecast may turn out to be far-fetched but we do at some stage need to consider whether what we want – or need – are more tourists, or fewer tourists who spend more money. This is at the heart of the debate between quality and quantity, although it has somehow been reduced at times to an argument over whether we should have campsites with people eating straight out of tins and filtering their own water, an argument based on stereotypes which does very little to deepen the debate.

What can we offer Mr Pisani’s dream demographic? Do high-net worth individuals staying at the Hilton appreciate being stuck in a traffic jam for a quarter of an hour because a bus is stuck behind someone double-parked outside a pastizzeria? Do cruise passengers off a top- notch liner want to pick their way through the dust and confusion at Castille Square?

And assuming that we are able to attract a particular kind of tourist just because we say we will – which is clearly nonsense – does one preclude the other? Can six-star tourists at St George’s Bay happily co-exist with teenagers throwing up on the beach at 6am?

Should we aim for nothing less than four star, assuming that three-star hotels are anyway losing so much money that they will soon become extinct? Should we just become a nation of six-star hotels with a boutique hotel on every corner in Valletta? Where would we get the trained staff to serve them?

Of course, we must get better at everything that we do, whether we want three, four, five or six-star tourists. We should do so because people want value for money no matter how affluent they are. And because we should have a sense of pride.