Illegal guiding

The Tourist Guide Service Act No. XLVI of 1965 clearly spells out that no person shall offer his services as a tourist guide or perform such services for a remuneration or reward unless he is in possession of a licence, and any person who performs such services for a remuneration or reward without a licence shall be guilty of an offence liable on conviction to imprisonment or a fine.

What the legislator had in mind when enacting the law was to make it illegal for anyone to organise for a profit guided tours without engaging the services of a licensed tourist guide. It was never meant to make it illegal for a parent of a large family or for a teacher in possession of a teacher's warrant as provided in Art. 9 Act XXIV (1988) to take schoolchildren on cultural tours or outings.

I must admit I was quite upset on reading MUT president John Bencini's instructions to heads of school to cancel all educational outings. So far back as I can remember, during my school days, cultural visits and school outings were organised on a regular basis throughout the scholastic year, and certainly not for any profit or any personal gain by our teachers.

If today I have made guiding my profession I must thank teachers for the love they instilled in me at that tender age for our culture, our heritage, our history and for all that is Maltese. Teachers never had any cause to be concerned as this law is not there to prevent them from imparting their knowledge, but simply to protect the livelihood of licensed tourist guides.

The junior college lecturer was not fined over a school outing. He was stopped by the enforcement section of the MTTA last summer because he was guiding without a licence a group of foreign students in Valletta.

It is pertinent to point out that these foreign students come to Malta mostly during the summer months to attend TEFL courses and are charged for all the services they receive. One has to choose at random any school brochure to see how much these students are being asked to pay for their lodging, the language course as well as for all the cultural tours that are planned.

I wonder how many have ever asked themselves how many schools of English as a Foreign Language are registered to operate on our islands. They seem to be springing up like mushrooms. Even the MUT has been issued with a permit to run such a school at the Teachers' Institute in Valletta. And you can bet these schools are all operating at a profit. In spite of this, only a handful employ us in summer to act as guides with the foreign students under their care. The greater majority of these schools organise daily cultural tours to our places of interest, accompanied by unauthorised persons who go about their business with impunity.

It is also most unfair to say that lecturing about history and culture is the monopolistic domain of licensed guides. We never had any such pretensions. Readers should be reminded that government-licensed tourist guides only form a minority group with limited consultative power at ministerial level. But does our weakness in number make it legitimate for big organisations to trample on our rights?

Tourist guides have been for years filing report upon report in particular against two TEFL schools who bring to our islands hundreds of foreign students and have never engaged the services of a licensed guide.

Unfortunately, in spite of the many reports, the Tourist Guides Service Act is still being flouted, and not just by minibus drivers and an ever increasing number of foreigners. It is not just the small bucket tour operator who is at fault but some of our bigger, respectable organisations.