Quality tourism, no quality data

On the afternoon of Friday, June 5, motorists heading home along Regional Road were greeted by 12 naked men sitting on a ledge.

The men, who appeared to be tourists, had climbed onto the rocks between their airbnb and the road. Naturally, a video did the rounds and, eventually, it reached the hotel lobby itself.

It was funny until you looked at the timing of it. New rules on anti-social behaviour had taken effect on June 1, just days earlier, letting the police fine tourists on the spot for public drinking and for wearing swimwear away from the beach. Within a week, the country had produced exactly the scene those fines were written for.

But the men are not really the story. The timing is. We legislate against the symptoms in June, then spend the other 11 months building the demand for quantity.

Three days after those men appeared on the ledge, the prime minister was at the airport welcoming Delta’s first direct flight from New York. He used the moment to insist that quality and quantity can go together and that a “critical mass” of visitors is still necessary. The goal, he said, is now tourists who spend more and stay longer.

In all fairness, the New York route is a move in the right direction. It is the long-haul, higher-spending profile the strategy says it wants. But it is one route which operates three flights a week over the summer. The rest of the ledger points the other way.

Reading Vision 2050 and the National Tourism Strategy, you would think the debate about quality versus quantity had already been settled in favour of quality. But then you look at the numbers.

Malta took a record 4.02 million arrivals in 2025, up 12.9% on the year before, while spend per visitor crept up to €971 from €924. That is roughly five per cent more spending against almost 13% more visitors and it is residents who absorb the difference in noise and congestion. The €971 flatters the picture, however. It is a nominal figure, unadjusted for inflation. If you strip out rising airfare costs, the actual spend per tourist has barely moved in years.

Despite the work it took to achieve this growth, the trouble is that Vision 2050 projected 4.5 million tourists a year by 2035 and Malta hit four million in 2025. That is already a full decade early with no revised ceiling published since.

So where does all that volume come from? We can follow it to the airport. Malta pays for its own air access: according to the Malta Tourism Authority’s 2022 financial report, as reported by The Shift News, the authority spent around €54 million in a single year on route development and marketing, structured as a payment for each tourist brought into the country. Structure the incentive that way and you have told the market exactly what you value: passenger volume.

Which airlines received the money? The MTA refused to say. What we do know is that Ryanair, which bought the government’s golden share in Malta Air in 2024 for a pre-agreed €25,000, now runs about 70 routes here. It carried roughly half of everyone who passed through the airport last year (about five million passengers) and is projecting six million this year alone.

Ryanair’s own social media team put it casually on Facebook: “Booking €20 flights to Malta is my personality this summer.” It is a fair description of the visitor the state keeps paying to attract while insisting in public that it wants the opposite.

Amsterdam ran a ‘stay away’ campaign aimed at the visitors it did not want- Nicholas Borg

The same instinct shows up at sea. Noma Island, a floating party platform France turned away after local and environmental opposition, was licensed here and anchored off Comino, a protected Natura 2000 site, over the objections of nine NGOs and four councils. It is still there.

On land, the authority’s own statements give the game away. In a 2025 release it announced a shift to “enhancing the quality of the visitor experience” and, in the same breath, named SummerDaze, a chart-pop festival it organises, among its proudest offerings. The 2026 edition runs at €10 a night in the new €16 million arena at Ta’ Qali, built to hold 17,000.

The infrastructure tells a similar story. A Deloitte study commissioned by the Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association (MHRA) found that, if every approved bed were built, Malta would need 4.8 million arrivals a year to fill them, well beyond the 2035 target the government claims to be working towards.

Yet, Malta manages numbers perfectly well when it decides to. At the Blue Lagoon, where peak days draw upwards of 10,000 visitors, the state brought in a booking system and stepped up enforcement. It can count and it can cap.

So it is not a problem of capability  but of alignment. An authority whose job is to attract tourists cannot also be the body trusted to limit them.

The industry can see it too. After the ledge incident, the MHRA called for zero tolerance and said plainly that Malta is not a free-for-all destination. Its president has been arguing in print for better yields rather than bigger volumes.

When the hotel lobby is the one writing the quality-tourism argument, the slogan is in trouble.

Other destinations have made the harder choice. In 2023, Amsterdam ran a ‘stay away’ campaign aimed at the visitors it did not want and set a target of fewer overnight stays. It chose which tourism to lose. Here, we subsidise the arrival, then fine it once it misbehaves.

So here is the simplest test of whether any of this is serious: publish a ceiling, stick to it and name the airlines taking public money. When that happens, the spend-per-visitor argument will have earned the right to be made.

Until then, the policy is not quality over quantity. It is quantity, with an apology issued on the spot.

Nicholas Borg is a data engineer and writer based in Malta.