Tourism: never mind the quality

The strategy that prevails in the tourism industry still appears to be one: never mind the quality, let’s just go for the numbers. Despite declarations by policymakers of an impending change in direction towards a higher-paying segment of the market, they don’t seem to be preventing investors from pouring money into increasing capacity rather than efforts being made to remedy today’s tired and outdated strategies.

A Deloitte document entitled Carrying Capacity Study for Tourism in the Maltese Islands, commissioned by the Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association, has identified some of the threats to the industry’s future that have long been known. Malta, the study found, would need to nearly double its pre-pandemic tourism volume from 2.8 million per year to 4.7 million in order to fill 80 per cent of the country’s hotel beds after all the planned new ones come on the market. Low occupancy, though, would damage profitability and even threaten economic stability, the study warned.

There is no one better than tourism operators who work on the coalface of the industry to identify what is wrong with the present “let’s go for numbers” strategy. Stakeholders identified “traffic,...