Considerable emphasis is placed on tourists’ comments when they leave a holiday destination, but travel writer Doug Lansky is not quite convinced that this is what should preoccupy tourism authorities.

“If you ask departing tourists what they thought about Stockholm, they gush that it was a very clean city.

“But I think we can be pretty sure that when they were sitting at home trying to decide where to go on holiday, they didn’t say ‘Oh, let’s go somewhere clean this year’…” he told The Business Observer.

Mr Lansky was in Malta to speak at a recent conference for tourism stakeholders organised by Impact Consulting, but when the Malta Tourism Authority found out about his visit, they took the opportunity to ask for his assessment of Malta as a tourism destination – the results of which were not made public.

Doug Lansky

Apart from being a travel writer, Mr Lansky is also a tourism development advisor, specialising in destination audits.

The owners of high end properties often put pressure on tourism authorities to attract more high end visitors. But raising rates and occupancy depends on three things, not all of which are in the hotel’s control. The first is clearly to improve the hotel itself – but paradoxically, the second is to stop building hotels, he warned.

“When there is a scarcity of product, the rate goes up,” he explained.

It helps to have better architecture standards, nice shaded areas and good restaurants

However, the third and more effective way to attract high end visitors is to improve the rest of the environment – and he felt that the sea around Malta was crucial to protect.

“Even if it has a lovely pool and spa, the sea around the hotel is what matters,” he said. “It also helps to have better architectural standards, nice shaded areas and good restaurants and so on. But you cannot just go for the path of least resistance and let hotels invest in better rooms. It is not as easy to fix the environment outside and that is why it is being neglected in so many destinations. But on average, 80 per cent of a tourist’s spend is outside the hotel. So that is the place to be focussing your attention.”

Mr Lansky has been to over 120 countries but had never been to Malta before, admitting that as a downhill skier and kite-surfer the island was not an obvious choice for him. But he also confessed that it lacked what he called “that epic thing” which caught a potential tourist’s imagination at the time they were deciding where to go.

“There are so many destinations and the cost of long-haul flights is no longer the deterrent that it was,” he added.

“This is why so many destination managers are now also looking at marketing, who will use their influence to make things change. I guess that when I stand in a bar and tell someone where I have been, I want to them to have a ‘wow’ moment, when they put down their glass and ask what it was like…

“You have to think if you have one iconic photo to put up which would catch the attention of all these hundreds of thousands of potential visitors, what would it be? You want to see someone doing something in that photo that you can either imagine yourself doing or imagine your child doing. You have to want to put it on your Facebook feed as a ‘brag’ photo,” he said, admitting that he had not had that sort of visceral reaction from anything he had seen in Malta.

“Your water quality is amazing and you have to protect it as much as you can – which includes sitting on the beach, which you can also mess up as so many other places have, like Surfers’ Paradise, by building high rises which cast shadows over the beach.”

He is also a great believer in sustainability and said that limiting supply could be very beneficial – although he declined to give examples in Malta.

“In Iceland, for example, they know that 80 per cent of visitors want to experience the thermal hot springs, and that 2,500 a day can visit. So you can match that against how many tourists there are in the country and the frustrations of people who turn up and cannot get in. So why is the Icelandic airline trying to increase the number of seats available if the main attractions are already full? There is going to be somewhere in every destination where there are too many people. It drives the locals bananas and it is not good for the visitor experience either.

More than 600 big ships pass through the Giudecca Canal each year, ferrying millions of passengers to Venice. Photo: Meunierd/Shutterstock.com

“At some point, you need to decide whether you want it to be an awful visitor experience or if you want to cap it in a smart way. What is your bottleneck here? Is it the Hypogeum or Comino or Mdina or Valletta’s cathedral?

Mr Lansky is a great believer in removing even minor irritations from the surroundings and using common sense to make things work better

“Dubrovnik is limiting the number of visitors and San Francisco’s Lombard Street is charging visitors. Venetians recently swam out and formed a human blockade to stop cruise ships… ” he said, referring to a protest which has become virtually an annual event.

“And cruise ships are not bringing in the money that people think they are. Most of the numbers are given by the cruise companies which have an agenda to make it sound positive, according to academics who have done studies on this… And they use the figures to negotiate a better deal on port fees, all based on faulty data. That needs to be looked at – everywhere! It is always worth doing a critical study yourself.”

Mr Lansky is a great believer in removing even minor irritations from the surroundings, and using common sense to make things work better, something he has learned over his decades of travel writing. Simple examples? Why would you have a 90-minute parking limitation in a tourist site which could sustain two-hour visits?

“Why would you want to limit the time that they could otherwise use in restaurants, coffee shops, souvenir outlets, attractions or museums?” he said, shaking his head.

“This is just one very small example of where infrastructure can have an impact on tourist spend.”

His audit took into account 25 factors, ones which affect different people to different extents – but he was very careful to point out that what motivates a tourist to book a destination is very different to what actually affects them when they are there.

“Modern tourism has only been around for about 60 years and we are not really hard-wired to stand around and look at stuff. Hundreds of thousands of years have trained us to be hunter-gatherers,” he explained.

“Which is why we now shop and dine! That is why these two activities are so comfortable to us when we are travelling…”