As in most spheres of life, there is always a risk of having too much of a good thing. Whether it’s rich food, money, friends or clients when you cannot absorb more than you can handle effectively, you risk ruining the success you may have achieved had you been more judicious.
This is not just a philosophical reflection on life. Many businesses fail to understand that top line figures are vanity, while bottom line is sanity. When I hear our business leaders gloat about the impressive tourism figures, I cringe as I am sure that they never stop to consider the sustainability of ever increasing growth in tourist numbers.
Obviously, this reflection may not hold much water with a hotel entrepreneur who is interested in this year’s profits or for a politician whose most pressing objective is getting elected in the next contest.
Unfortunately, there is little in depth economic analysis of our tourism figures or the performance of our national airline and how this affects the leisure and financial services industry. One gets far more meaningful information by listening informally to operators who are prepared to express their opinions privately on how we should be defining our strategy for the tourism industry for the next decade and beyond.
It is no surprise that there is such a thing as a saturation point for any industry. Many will argue that Malta has reached this point already and we should be thinking on how to control the continuous growth in the number of visitors before it becomes too late. Important tourist cities like Venice have adopted a high-cost strategy whereby they allowed operators to charge exorbitant prices for the pleasure of being in Venice, even if it is just for a day trip.
Top line figures are vanity, while bottom line is sanity
The Financial Times recently carried an interesting article entitled ‘Barcelona takes steps to curb tourist surge’. Local operators and politicians will keep repeating the mantra that Malta has still not reached this level of saturation in the tourism industry. This could simply show that they are in denial about how fast the tourism product may deteriorate in the eye of our visitors.
According to the FT, Barcelona is outlawing new city centre hotels and tourist apartments to try to control hordes of visitors that authorities say ‘threaten to suffocate one of Europe’s most popular travel destinations’. Can we honestly deny that this is also happening in our overcrowded tiny island in places like Sliema, St Julian’s, Buġibba and Marsascala?
Admittedly, Barcelona receives 17 million overnight visitors a year. These numbers of tourists, even if spread evenly over the whole year, create immense demand for beds and restaurants. The locals may have initially enjoyed the bonanza of tourists spending money, but their quality of life is now being shattered.
Janet Sanez, a senior member of the Barcelona local government in charge of urban development, says: “We are delighted that so many people want to visit us but what is at stake now is the very city that we all admire. We need regulation and we need a better equilibrium.”
Ms Sanez makes a very valid point: “Some of Barcelona’s most idiosyncratic neighbourhoods, such as the former fishermen’s district of Barceloneta, were losing their ‘essence’ as a result of tourism. There are some neighbourhoods that are emptying because people can no longer afford to live there. Normal flats are being replaced by tourist apartments.”
There are lessons to be learned from Barcelona’s strategic direction in tourism. Malta is not Barcelona nor is it Nice, even if we share the Mediterranean Sea with these idyllic cities. Our tiny, overpopulated, traffic-congested country is already aesthetically being ruined by over-development, an inadequate road network, lack of civic pride in a large section of our population that cares very little about keeping the island clean, and lack of enforcement of perfectly sensible regulation.
Of course, some local tourism operators have understood that the secret of success is to invest in the quality of service. In Valletta, for instance, it is refreshing to see the number of small boutique hotels springing up. The same applies to the quality restaurants that offer real value for money.
To understand the difference between quality and speculative investment, one just has to compare aesthetically Sliema’s seafront Tower Road to Nice’s Promenade des Anglais. High quality service is what we need in tourism as in all other spheres of life because short-sighted objectives could lead to regrettable results.
johncassarwhite@yahoo.com