On top of the world

How does it feel to wake up on top of the world, sorry – of Europe? Does it feel any different from yesterday?

ngrima@independent.com.mt

We have not grown an inch taller and we are probably less well off than we were last night.

We just don’t know how lucky we are. What did the good citizens of Aleppo do to deserve what they have been going through? Or those of Kirkuk? Or those of Mali who have sent back to France people who had been forcibly repatriated there in view of the agreement with the EU?

Or the citizens of Mexico, now that Trump will raise the wall between the two countries that he promised and they will end up more at the mercy of the narcotics traffickers? Or the citizens of the Philippines, whose president seems to have admitted he threw people out of a helicopter?

I repeat: we just don’t know how lucky we are, even with all this cold, and even with all the grumbles we can come up with.

As the world wobbled and changed direction in 2016, we are marching forward to meet whatever this new year will throw at us. Maybe there’ll be more political upheavals such as in 2016, with Brexit and Trump.

Today I want to draw attention to two developments that I’ve only recently noted and which to me signify a changed landscape around us.

The first is the incredible ease with which people go abroad. Many people around me who used to go abroad once a year now go on a trip at the drop of a hat. Where before they used to go to Gozo for the odd weekend, they now as easily (possibly more because of the queues at Cirkewwa) go to Rome, to Milan or Manchester for a game of football, and further afield too. We are fast becoming one of the more travelled peoples around – which is understandable, considering the smallness of our country and the incredible ease of travel, thanks to the lowcost airlines. Now that is something I definitely do not regret my small part in pushing some years back.

The second development, of which I only became aware just a short while back, is the Air bnb explosion in Malta. I knew of the existence of its existence, but thought they only existed in other countries. It was only recently that – on a whim – I searched for Air bnb in Malta and suddenly the map of Malta was studded with Air bnb offers at incredibly low prices.

I loved reading the current offers but I enjoyed even more reading the comments from guests describing their experience and realising how positive these were on the whole. So this is where the huge increase in people coming to Malta is going, rather than to hotels and the like.

The Air bnb patrons are, if they will pardon my way of putting it, lower than low-cost. They use buses and never taxis, and they go in for self-catering. But they melt into the background wonderfully and they say – well, most of them at any rate, how they managed to cover the islands in the short time they were here.

One thing many of them seem to complain about is about the weak (or absent) wi-fi in these residences, but even here Malta is well on its way (also thanks to its small dimension) to becoming a wi-fi island in a short time.

These developments, as I see it, are leaving Air Malta high and dry since they feed on lowcost airlines. Now that the government seems to have given up on the merger with Alitalia, my impression is that the airline is seeking to get into the black by ruthlessly scaling down on routes that are losing money – including well-loved ones such as Frankfurt and Manchester. It is a downsized airline we foresee in the future, smaller than the big low-cost carriers such as Ryanair and EasyJet.

While this is mostly acceptable to me, what I find difficult to accept and understand is how it is the minister who keeps making pronouncements on the airline when, in my opinion, no minister – now or then – is capable of running an airline and running one should never be part of his brief.

When we speak of low-cost carriers and Air bnb, we are speaking of a new economic model that is far removed from the top-down models of the past, a new economic model that is mostly unregulated or deregulated, and to which most people in this country seem to have taken like a fish takes to water.

Now that the genie is out of the bottle, it is difficult – if not impossible – to get it back inside. If only the EU, of which we our country is now the proud president, could understand the trend, work with it and build upon it rather than frustratingly trying to turn it back and bottle it down.

I believe that the coming months may show us the futility of insisting on numbing austerity, and the huge opportunities that are on offer if we let creativity loose and allow people to get on with their lives as they see fit.