Malta’s travel landscape has evolved over recent years to become less dependent on tour operators, allowing for a healthy business mix, Tourism Minister Karmenu Vella said yesterday.

The island now attracted a mix of tour operating, independent, VFR (visiting friends and relatives) and business tourism, he told a seminar organised by the Low-Cost Travel Group.

Mr Vella said that a generation or two ago Maltese tourism faced two major challenges: a heavy dependence on the British tourism market, which generated 80 per cent of incoming tourism, and the fact that almost 90 per cent of traffic was generated by tour operators.

A lot had changed since and the island’s source markets diversified so that it now attracted tourists from a wide variety of countries.

Today, he said, the UK’s share declined to “safer economic levels” and now accounted for about 31 per cent of total in-coming tourism.

“This has not been achieved by reducing the volume of British tourists coming to Malta but by growing alternative markets at a faster rate,” he noted.

He praised the group for its success and contribution to Maltese tourism.

“Your growth figures to Malta have been impressive from sales of about 30,000 in 2011 to projections of 60,000 tourists this year and 75,000 next year. Our business relationship is healthy, our level of support to your efforts strong,” the minister said.