I’ve just gotten off the phone after yet another unsuccessful booking experience. It’s become standard now. I pick up the phone, dial the number  and the phone is answered. I start speaking in Maltese but I’m stopped mid-sentence and asked to speak English. Till this point, there is no issue: English is my first language and one of the country’s official languages, after all.

I venture a few words in English and, from the silence at the other end, it becomes abundantly clear that I’m not being understood. I try speaking slower, enunciating every word and get a garbled reply that I cannot understand for the life of me. I try again using fewer words; I get even less of a reply back.

I’m getting frustrated now, so I ask to speak to a Maltese person and get no response. I haven’t got all morning, so I say thank you and hang up. I’ll probably try again later or do what I did last time and drive to the place to book in person.

I read an article this week stating that some tourists know more about Malta than people who work in the hospitality industry here and, though this didn’t come as a surprise, what did surprise me was that the underlying message was that workers didn’t know much about Malta because they were foreign. I mean, I’m not saying it’s not true but I have spoken to several Maltese-born and bred hospitality workers who couldn’t show you where Ħaġar Qim is on the map if you paid them. I recently spoke to one who couldn’t tell a tourist where to find a coffee in Valletta or what was worth seeing in our UNESCO World Heritage Site capital city.

The point I’m trying to make is that we are failing on all fronts. We ask people who can’t speak our languages to man the telephones and fail to educate our citizens about what it means to be part of the service industry. How can you have people in an entire sector, which is intended to be one of the more sociable ones, unwilling or unable to help clients in a country which is so dependent on tourism? Where is the training?

Would it take so much for us to do things properly and try to draw people back to the island instead of making tourists swear they’ll never return?- Anna Marie Galea

I suppose this is what you get for constantly pushing the agenda that everyone, regardless of talent or inclination, should go to university and promoting a climate where you can’t do anything without a degree. We now have no choice but to either import workers quickly, recklessly and with wild abandon, which means that they get zero training, or try to fill in spots with the few local people who often unwillingly take on hospitality jobs because they’ve constantly been given the subliminal message that they could be doing better.

It’s honestly such a shame that it’s come to this. I was recently in Italy in one of its lesser-known areas and the effort everyone made to understand, guide and give us suggestions was like nothing I’ve ever experienced locally.

Would it take so much for us to do things properly and try to draw people back to the island instead of making tourists swear they’ll never return?

If now is not the time for us to be competitive and invest in quality tourism, when will it be?