Travel and Leisure Articles

Tourism in Malta

Tourism is a very heterogeneous industry, which is defined at the time of visitors consumption. Information technologies have made the creation of tourism growth poles possible a click of a button away and have allowed the development of new markets.

The tourism suppliers compete against one another. Malta is competing with new destinations such as Tunisia and northern Africa that can benefit from resources that are intact or in any case very little exploited. These countries benefit from very favourable economic conditions including low wages.

Every product or service have life cycle, it follow the laws of natural growth, which usually takes the form of a bell-shaped curve. The cycle begins with the arrival of the product/service on the market, continues with the growth phase when turnover tends to rise sharply, and then reaches maturity and its peak value. From there on it starts to downfall until it reaches the end of life and become obsolete.

In my opinion, it looks as if the older tourism countries are now paying the price of having been the first ones in the field. Many destinations appear to be nowadays out of fashion.

The challenge is therefore how to extend the maturity phase of the life cycle - not to reach end of life and become obsolete.

Bring Back the British (BBB)

Malta being an established holiday destination especially with the British has to evaluate its past strengths. It is important to cultivate what we had previously gained in the past, sustain it, if we have lost touch. Malta has to work hard to regain back its forte with the British and therefore gain back its past position. This has to be done very quickly.

It is to my opinion that Malta s branding should be focused of how to Bring Back the British or in short BBB. We need to analyze why the British are not preferring Malta and why they are going to much more expensive countries like Antigua, the Bahamas, Florida, the Far East and the Indian Ocean, South Africa, Spain, France, Italy and - The gulf between the two nations is getting wider, year on year. It is therefore necessary to remind the British that

1. Malta is a holiday destination.

2. In Malta we adopt British legacies. We drive on the left, speak English, we have more red post boxes and telephone kiosks than you could find in London.

3. Malta is only 3 hours away from London with a shared British heritage, a historical and cultural dimension in the middle of the Mediterranean.

4. Malta is a destination where you could soak in the sun and leisure for a few days then there is plenty else to do.

If the British afford to fly to Antigua, 9 hours by plane spend about 600-1000 GBP per night to lie on the beach in an island smaller than Malta with an airport that looks like Luqa, with roads in the same condition as ours - all to be bored after 3 days because there is just nothing else to do, then we have excellent chances to attract and BBB. Probably, this will not happen overnight, but if we are smart and we do it right maybe offering all-inclusive resorts then we have a very good chance to succeed.

Innovation

Looking back to history, it becomes clear that the tourism sector can be considered as innovative. As early as the 19th century, Thomas Cook was pioneering package tours. At a later stage, tour operators invented the charter flight as a way of dealing with the inevitable seasonal peaks in air travel and to make flying cheaper. Now we are dealing with Low cost airlines plus a shift towards cruise line tourism, which standardised and industrialised the tourism dream for an ever greater number of visitors.

It is the local attractions that give the products of the destination their distinct flavour. Every country has its own Location-specific attractions and products that differentiate the destination and make it unique. The competition that exists between destinations can therefore be described as monopolistic. It is therefore that a tourism country like Malta with a variety of attractions can, however, reposition itself on the market.

We have to do this in a very clever and innovative way. Malta has to make better use of the nation’s cultural resources, in an effort to diversify a tourism portfolio that has relied too heavily on seaside attractions. We need to be proactive. We have to focus on our strengths, our people, our experience, our hospitality, our bi-linguality, our wealth of history.

Today we cannot rely any more on the formula of sun, sea and sand. Malta has to diversify its product into new tourism segments, namely cultural tourism, English language learning, conferences and incentives, sports, and Gozo as a destination on its own.

Maximise in all aspects of life

As human beings, by nature we want to maximise in all aspects of life. We do not just want to walk aside the attractions, we want to discover the city, feel good about how we spent our time and money. We want to listen to legends and myths that characterize the city. Take pride of it, be excited and tell others about our accomplishment.

We have to provide interactivety, master the potential tool of the World Wide Web, avail and disseminate information over the new, for free. The official site Malta Tourist Authority http://www.visitmalta.com/ebooks had recently launched a new page on its portal and provides free ebooks in different languages readily downloadable just by a click of a button.

The interactive DVDs are reference history source in their own merits and are provided to in 5 different languages (Maltese, English, Italian, German and Spanish). The content, simply immerses you into the detail, provide you will all the information you want…in your preferred language. This would provide you with an opportunity to enhance your language skills, maybe recall how the Maltese language sounds like!

The DVDs provide you with a virtual tour of the city, and you could watch it on your PC, at the comfort of your home. Each DVD is longer than 75 minutes.

The DVDs has an inbuilt feature to download the MP3 content. Instantly available, the downloadable city guide is available for transfer to your Smart Mobile Phone, iPod or other mp3 player. When in Malta you are free to roam around the city, with confidence, as if you were a local.

Conclusion

Malta has its distinctive raw materials of tourism, its worth as a destination that uniquely identifies itself. It is with this raw material that the market creates destinations. The visitor chooses the destination that seems to offer the greatest utility. The tourist will be ready to come to Malta as his willingness to pay increases with the uniqueness of the destination. However, we need to nurture back our good thighs with the British and be Innovative in the way we market Malta as a holiday destination.

Obviously the success of any initiative does not only depend on quality and price of the end product but how it is marketed. Achieving this goal is not an easy task as this would require synergy from all frontiers and commitment from all stake holders. It is because of willingness, commitment; strive towards the importance of viewing our heritage as a potential source of material wealth for the nation that we are very positive that Malta will achieve its goals in tourism.

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