Last May I purchased a weekly bus ticket which cost €6.50. I was therefore astonished to be charged €21 for the same service on my last visit in September. This is a staggering increase of 230 per cent.

I was also informed that the daily ticket has been abolished and replaced by a €2 ticket with a duration of just two hours. I found these charges surprising by any standard.

This last visit to Malta was my 19th holiday in these wonderful and beautiful islands and I have always found the Maltese people to be courteous, helpful and, above all, friendly. It therefore surprised me that when I visited two of the transport locations for assistance, I was greeted with unusual apathy.

At the Sliema kiosk, which initially appeared to be unattended, there was a young man leaning against the outside of the door smoking. I approached him, as I noticed he was wearing a Malta Public Transport shirt. After a series of monosyllabic answers, it transpired that he was manning the kiosk and did not appear to appreciate being interrupted during his smoke, but eventually went into the kiosk and sold me two weekly tickets. Other questions regarding alternative options were met with the same apathy and non-interest.

A few days later, on a visit to Buġibba, I called at the bus station office where an employee sat opposite the open window and appeared to be ‘playing’ with a mobile phone; I was clearly interrupting his space.

His first eventual response to my question regarding a list of charges was that none existed, but this was later changed to the fact that they had “run out of copies” and he then went back to whatever he was doing on the mobile phone.

If this massive increase in revenue is going directly into Malta’s economy for the benefit of the Maltese people, it would be churlish of me to complain, but if it is, as I suspect, going into the coffers of a foreign company, I am sure it does Malta a great disservice.

With regard to these increases, if the point of the exercise was to deter holidaymakers (who use the buses as the main mode of travel about the islands) from revisiting, then I fear it has been a resounding success.

The abolition of the daily ticket does not make sense, and the introduction of a two-hour ticket is ludicrous.