Traffic Lights – Managing tourism professionally

This week I will discuss the issue of managing our strategy for effectiveness (not simply as an efficient publication that is filled with futile wish lists)

If we want to regenerate tourism again once it is safe and responsible to do so, then we need to have persons who can manage tourism not just mechanically but professionally; we need people who can look at innovation not in the shapeless forms of abstract buildings but in the character and culture of the place or destination itself; we need people who can really breathe life into tourism as a sustainable and responsible socio-cultural activity instead of the mediocre quantitative mass industry we have so carelessly built over the years.

The UK has created a traffic light system to determine safe and responsible destinations in a post-pandemic period. We are surprised that we never made it past the amber stage. Why should we be surprised? We should look at our faults, we need to implement the three Rs of tourism that I first mooted in 2020 – Reflect, Redevelop and Restore (the three Rs that the MTA very carefully reused in the strategy for tourism 2021- 2030). Each of these stages shows that we should build a sense of commitment, trust and synergy between all key stakeholders (the authorities, the businesses and the local community); we should not think in numbers to fill our existing beds and reach our senseless records for tourism for the last few years; we have to plan an activity that will attract that tourist who wants to be here instead of the one who happens to be here.

As a researcher, academic and consultant my primary purpose is not to promote the tourism we were used to up to 2020 but to create an alternative tourism, one that I have been working on with the University of Malta and the Malta Tourism Society for the past 10 years, one that actually started as an idea to add value to the visitor experience during my appointment as director Tourism.

If we want to be considered a safe and responsible destination we have to manage tourism, this will not happen if we politicise tourism or try to sweet talk foreign governments (like the UK government and European governments); but it will happen if we all work together to achieve an activity that reflects the real destination.

From this week I will be concluding my articles with practical and useful recommendations on how we can make this a better destination. As a start I will be discussing San Anton Gardens in Attard.

My next article will include the Management and Visitor Interpretation of the walled town of Mdina.

appointed as an expert for the High Streets Task Force in the UK. His main area of research is