What`s all this Fuss About

8^th October 2006

The Malta Independent on Sunday

I can’t comprehend all this fuss from the Malta Tourism Authority (MTA) board where its members were threatened with legal action if they are found responsible for leaking out information.

MTA is no commercial organisation subject to competitive pressures. It is a national authority tasked with the responsibility of safeguarding the health of the tourism industry by seeking the involvement and co-operation of all participants in this field.

To my mind, MTA’s board should deal only with our strategy and its meetings could just as well be open to the public and the press. Getting everybody on board, and diffusing awareness about the importance of cultivating this sector to build a valuable brand for the Malta tourism product, could probably be better achieved by placing MTA board meetings in the public domain, rather than launching an expensive and quite meaningless media campaign.

Obviously, there are elements of a commercial nature related to procurement of goods and services that need not be exposed to the four winds. These need not be tackled at board level. The board should focus on strategy rather than the boring task of controlling recurrent expenditure, which should be delegated to the permanent executive to operate within the budget approved by the board.

There is something chronically wrong with the whole concept of MTA or its predecessor the NTOM. I remember that for a short time in the eighties, I was a member of the NTOM. I probably attended two or three meetings at most and gave it up as I considered it a complete waste of time. The board used to spend precious time arguing whether to give a few hundred liri sponsorship to this, that or the other but never found time to have a serious discussion about strategy. It seems nothing has really changed except a new obsession for secrecy about matters that really should be widely diffused to get the whole nation on a mission to make our product better and more valuable for our guests.

The whole concept of MTA needs to be re-thought. If the MTA is tasked with the execution of strategy what exactly do we need a Minister of Tourism for? And what can a Minister do for tourism if his colleagues in Cabinet, and their boss the Prime Minister, do not show sufficient sensitivity to the importance of our tourist sector?

What we need is a mixed committee chaired by the Prime Minister and incorporating a select Cabinet representation and representatives from the main private sector tourism business organisations. The CEO of MTA would be the secretary and act as the main link between this mixed committee and the permanent executive at the Ministry.

The mixed committee would hold its meetings in public and focus strictly on strategy especially on product development with all its dimensions. Without product development we will never build an attractive brand.

On product development alone, such a mixed committee would have an agenda to last five years. Let me just give a taste of some urgent improvement needed to render our tourist product more attractive, justifying a higher price to extract more value from this industry.

This week I had dinner at the Valletta Waterfront. My foreign guest was indeed impressed by the excellent work done by the promoters in restoring the Pinto stores and by the bubbliness and the colourful environment created. Business seems to be doing quite well, so I think it is a matter of time when further activities get organised to render the place more buzzing. But looking across the harbour, the bastions and fortifications of the Three Cities were in pitch darkness. How can we hide such treasures other countries can only dream of?

What does it take to raise the standard of our taxi and horse-cab services? Can’t we impose the discipline of a traditional uniform for the karozzin driver? Can’t we educate such important participants that fair and transparent pricing is in their own long-term interest?

When are we going to build the aura that our Neolithic temples deserve? Apart from the work-in-progress to protect these priceless treasures, we need to play on their scarcity value by limiting accessibility and by building replicas in which there will be live performances demonstrating the original use of such monuments. We need to give a sense of realness to these monuments, to show that they were built for a purpose on a land that has a history much longer than civilisation itself.

The events calendar needs to be much more aggressive. Night tours to Valletta and Mdina should be a regular feature with a fireworks display every day at a fixed time.

In short, we must leverage our distinctive competences rather than continue to sell our products to the same segment which keeps demanding a greater discount every year. Our general marketing message has to be: “Come to Malta for three days as what you see here in three days is not possible anywhere else”.

Then, after putting our house in order through a determined product development effort, we should take this message to the middle and higher market segment of European society who are getting accustomed to short break holidays in addition to one main holiday in summer.

It should be a fairly easy sell, producing momentum which builds on its own success rather than engage us in useless exercises of finger pointing for blame sharing, inducing paranoiac efforts to preserve secrecy and darkness where we actually need light, ventilation and diffusion.