PHOTO: Marsaxlokk harbour and town on Malta island. (All photos courtesy of Thinkstock)
When it comes to tourism, the Mediterranean is a rough sea for little ships, no matter how beautifully they're crafted. No destination on the Mediterranean is more interesting and culturally rich than the three small islands of Malta (Malta, Camino and Gozo). Sounds crazy, right? History, culture and scenic beauty is spread thickly all over the lands bordering that sea on all of its shores and islands, but Malta is located dead center as the gateway between the sea's eastern and western shores.
Influenced by Phoenician, Roman, Greek, Arabic and North African cultures, it's packed with the remains of a history that was prominent through all of the developmental ages of Europe, from Neolithic through the Renaissance.
And yet, few Americans know anything more than vague references to Maltese falcons and Maltese crosses. Hopefully that's about to change. The Maltese Tourism Authority (MTA) left the U.S. market after September 11th collapsed the market. Without a direct flight and with the kinds of marketing investment necessary to promote in the U.S., Malta doubled down on its reliable short-haul European markets.
The MTA's newly hired representative in New York, Michelle Buttigieg, is laying the ground work for a new approach to the U.S. This fall, the MTA will work with Travalliance, publishers of TravelPulse, to work on an educational program for agents in Travel Agent Academy.
"We believe that agents are a key to educating the U.S. market," said Buttigieg. "We need to educate this market. Now we'll have a platform to engage them with."
Malta has a thriving short-haul beach tourism business from their top markets in the U.K., Germany and Italy. Though the country attracted 1,582,153 million international visitors in 2013, growing 9.3 percent, short haul beach travelers are notoriously low on yield and the size of Malta demands that the destination put a cap on growing quantity and striking out for fewer but higher yielding visitors. Furthermore, with so much of their tourism, about 33 percent, coming from the U.K. there is a lot of talk in Malta's press about bullying tactics from British operators.
PHOTO: One of Malta's many stunning blue-water beaches.
These are the hard numbers. About 52 percent of Malta's 2013 tourists came from Europe; 23 percent from Asia and the Pacific; 15 percent from the Americas; 5.1 percent Africa; and 4.7 percent Middle East. Some 438,783 tourists were British, 201,774 Italian and 134,306 German. Total tourist expenditure stood at $1.96 billion - the average per capita was $1,238. The average length of stay was 8.1 days with hotel nights at 12,890,268.
At roughly 122 square miles, the Maltese islands are about a tenth the size of Rhode Island and are home to about 420,000 people, or about 19,000 fewer than their British tourists. A strong annual feed of high-spending U.S travelers would give the island a way to lessen the flow of resource-using visitors and increasing the economic benefits.
The country attracted 19,052 Americans last year, a growth of some 8.2 percent, but not nearly enough. "American travelers spend more per day and they don't just come for a beach," said Buttigieg. "They're interested in who we are. They wander around the country exploring our culture, eating the food and meeting the people."
Local Controversy
The Maltese have been engaged in a healthy debate about the direction their tourism should take. As it provides 29 percent of the country's GDP, it's an argument with some urgency. A committee was formed under Tourism Minister Edward Zammit Lewis earlier this year to draw up a plan to carry the country through to 2020. Maltese tourism policy has always been heavily influenced by Air Malta and the members of the Malta Hotels and Restaurant Association's (MHRA).
In a vision statement Lewis said, "Tourism has economic and social benefits for the nation, but we also need to analyze the costs of the tourism activity in order to draw up a plan of action that meets the country's overall needs. We need to manage visitor numbers and target market segments that are more economically efficient in order to improve the value added."
The MHRA seems to be the leader in the call for fewer but higher-spending tourists, citing physical, environmental and social limitations. The MHRA has been pushing an agenda for more investment in promotion of Malta as a major Mediterranean destination, investments in tourism assets and products, labor training and for the establishment of "a maximum carrying capacity," or limit on arrivals. This last could be applied seasonally.
The same set of intractable issues have confronted Maltese tourism for decades: quantity versus quality arrivals, air access to North America, seasonality (there's a huge spike between June and October) and the dilemma of branding a destination that has such strong sun-and-fun associations in Europe, but has cultural riches that most international tourists from the U.S. would love to experience if they knew about them.
Incredible Historic Attractions
What most Americans know of Malta come from Dashiell Hammett's famous Maltese Falcon. It's said that the Knights of Malta paid an annual tribute to the Holy Roman Emperor of one hunting falcon per year. The second Maltese reference that most of us have is the Maltese Cross. Each of the eight points of the Maltese Cross represents a language spoken by the national contingents of the Knights of Malta (Basque, Castilian, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Provencal).
PHOTO: Beautiful Valletta is brimming with history.
The lore of the knights ranges from their heroic defense of Malta in 1565 against a vastly superior army of Turkish Janissaries and the brutal way the conducted themselves during the crusades. Valletta, the city they built and named for the legendary Grand Master Jean Vallete, is a perfect jewel of Renaissance fortress architecture. The city's St. John's Co-Cathedral with its chapels each dedicated to a language division of the Maltese Knights is an amazing and mysterious repository of chivalric mystery, sort of like Dan Brown, but authentic. The Co-Cathedral is also home to a rare Caravaggio, The Beheading of St. John, and it's a beauty.
The Malta of the knights is concentrated on the island of Malta in Valletta and in a beautiful medieval castle town in the island's center named Mdina, a.k.a. "the silent city." No cars run through Mdina. When you cross its drawbridge and into its perfectly preserved medieval streets you hear only the sound of your own footsteps.
The Maltese islands are also home to some of the most amazing pre-historic sites. Eleven different Neolithic sites have been UNESCO rated in Malta. Some archeologists have seen connections between some of these sites and the culture that built Stonehenge. The Hypogeum is an eight-story cavern dug down into sheer sand stone using only stone instruments. An extreme mystery, no one is sure why it was dug and for what purpose.
Gozo is a tiny island known more for village life as well as a rugged landscape (Middle Eastern in feel) and a beautiful coastline. It's also where the best-preserved of Malta's prehistoric temples, Ggantija, is located. At about 1.3 square miles, Camino is the smallest Maltese island. Limited in accommodations, most visitors to the island spend their time at the Blue Lagoon, a great place for swimming and snorkeling.
Looking forward, Malta is hoping to cultivate travel to largely unexplored areas in the countryside and sees trek tourism as a way to achieve that. A new group entitled MaltaGoesRural will bring the Maltese countryside into the picture with walking trails that explore natural and rural areas with scenic splendor, interesting villages, heritage sites and other highlights. According to Buttigieg, the MTA is now participating with USTOA and hopes to cultivate more operator interest.
In the past, the biggest obstacle for American travelers is the lack of a direct flight, but we've recently seen Greece increase its arrival figures even though most visitors were just flying through Athens to catch flight or ferries to the islands. You can easily get to Malta via any number of European gateways. Air Malta carried 43.7 percent of visitors into Malta in 2013; Ryan Air 27.4 percent; EasyJet 7.8 percent; Lufthansa 4.7 percent and Alitalia 2.3 percent. Cruise visitors decreased by about 23 percent to some 431,397 visitors.
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