A few days ago, the World Health Organization declared that, although we need to remain vigilant, the pandemic is no longer “a global health emergency”. It seems that the tourists who came to Malta in the first quarter of this year are arguably among the frontline standard bearers of these good, indeed very good, tidings.

Now that Covid is behind us we can compare the performance of our tourism sector in the first quarter of this year with that of the last year before its onset, that is 2019. With the virus out of the way, we can finally compare like with like.

Making this comparison even more interesting and revealing is the fact that 2019 was an all-time record year for our tourism. So how did we do in the first quarter of this year in comparison to its equivalent in the pre-Covid record setting benchmark year? Very, very well, actually.

Once again, I shall limit myself to facts and figures, not to impressions or prejudices. This sector is too crucial for our economy to do otherwise.

For starters, compared to the first quarter of 2019, this year inbound tourists (excluding overnight cruise liner passengers) increased by 4.0%. In addition, with the exception of the 65+ age group, all the other age brackets exceeded the corresponding 2019 figures. In other words, not only did this quarter set a new all-time record, but it demonstrates that Malta is pulling in more tourists of practically all ages. Clearly, it is evident that we’re doing something right.

Drilling deeper into the figures, the news gets even better. The number of nights that guests are spending here increased by 3.8% over the same period. Yet another all-time record.

Let me anticipate. The Jeremiahs among us will say that numbers are all well and good but how much more money are they leaving in the economy? Couldn’t it be, they might add, that the increasing numbers simply weigh down our infrastructure and crowd our islands while spending less?

Not quite. Total expenditure increased from €272 million to €312 million. That’s €40 million more injected into our economy, an increase of 14.7% over the all-time record of 2019. Bolstering these figures is yet another very significant one: expenditure per night shot up from €97 to €108, an increase of 10.5%.

So where are all these record-breaking tourists coming from and do the numbers point to any trend? It seems that the range of our source markets is becoming increasingly more diversified.

Some of our bedrock traditional ones, like the UK and Germany, registered a decrease while others like France and Italy posted an increase. At the same time, however, it is very encouraging that relatively new kids on our tourism block have shot up in numbers. Of note is that fact that almost 10,000 more tourists in total came from Austria, Hungary and Ireland.

John Adams, America’s second president, once quipped that, “Facts are stubborn things”. And indeed they are. The first quarter of 2019 was as all-time record for tourism. This year, comparing like with like, we have broken it on all levels.

I like.

Clayton Bartolo is the Minister for Tourism.