The drought in tourist arrivals for the next few months due to the COVID-19 outbreak is a rare opportunity to upgrade the island’s tourism offering, Tourism Minister Julia Farrugia Portelli said on Wednesday.
Addressing a video conference, Farrugia Portelli said that as the likelihood was that no tourists would be visiting the island for the upcoming summer period, this was a window to give a facelift to hotspots and upgrade the country’s overall tourism product.
“As we normally suspend works during summer in these areas so as to not inconvenience tourists with jackhammers and so on, this could be an opportunity to do works that would otherwise be put off,” she said.
Last month Times of Malta reported how the economy stands to lose out on an estimated €3 billion in tourist expenditure due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
An optimistic forecast by the government's economic advisors shows that tourists will not start coming back to the island until after Christmas.
The minister on Wednesday said talks were being held between the ministry, the Tourism Authority, and the cleansing division to come up with a plan of action for touristic zones.
The MTA, she added, was also drafting a strategy for "the tourism of tomorrow” which would map out the industry in the post-Coronavirus world.
“Its funny how just a month and a half ago I met with stakeholders including the hotels and restaurant association, and at the time we were talking about how we should try and curb the ever-increasing number of tourist arrivals and instead focus on attracting quality tourists,” she said.
Farrugia Portelli said she hoped the future of tourism in Malta would be based on those who spent more and left more in the economy.
Wednesday’s press conference was held to announce how a survey among students at the Institute of Tourism Studies showed that 99% were participating in online classes to further their studies.
Asked what was being done to ensure these students would still have a job once they graduated, Farrugia Portelli said the government was working on a number of plans to kickstart the tourism sector once the virus outbreak had been stubbed out.
“Firstly this will depend on all of us Maltese. We have to follow the health authorities’ advice because once the virus is contained locally, we have plans to utilise the domestic market to start the internal tourism market again,” she said, adding that this would be the first of a series of measures to get the economy ticking once again.
The message to students, Farrugia Portelli said, was to "keep studying" because there will be a tourism sector and they are the workers and leaders of the future.
During the press conference, ITS also announced that the work placements offered to students both locally and overseas had not been cancelled but postponed to a later date.
ITS chief executive Pierre Fenech, said this too showed how the future of tourism was not bleak, but bright.
Resits for exams that had been scheduled for June, he said, will be postponed till September.
But the important thing was students continued to engage with the online courses that were being offered, Fenech said.