Malta to be connected to new European capital through new legacy airline in coming weeks – Bartolo

Malta is set to be connected by air to a new European capital city through a new legacy airline in the coming weeks, which will open the possibility of new connections to the United States of America and Asia, Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo told Parliament on Monday.

Bartolo was speaking in Parliament during the Budget estimates session concerning his ministry, and spoke about the government’s strategy with regards to attracting airlines to operate out of the country.

“Low cost airlines have their positives, but we want to attract legacy carriers,” he said. An example of this is the government’s work to attract Scandinavian airlines because, he said, people from there have a tendency not to use low-cost carriers.

In the past few months in fact, three new airlines from this area – Air Baltic, SAS, and Norwegian Airlines – have started operating in Malta, together with Aer Lingus which is now offering flights to the Irish capital of Dublin, thereby also connecting Malta with another 17 airports in the United States and Canada.

“In the coming weeks we will add another European capital which will connect us with US and Asia through another legacy carrier,” he said.

Bartolo said that these long-haul markets signify the luxury hat Malta wants to attract, and revealed that the government is set to open the first Malta Tourism Authority office in New York City, which Bartolo described as a “gamechanger.”

Bartolo said that the tourism sector is one which signifies wealth for everyone in all sectors, particularly because today the government’s “prudent planning” has made the industry a year-round one.  This has resulted in increased faith and in turn led to more investment.

The Tourism Minister referred to when he was first appointed to the post in November 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, and said that the government’s answer to questions from operators about Malta’s return to normal were for them to stay prepared because they had a plan – and in fact, Malta recovered a year earlier than predicted, the minister noted.

“We did this alone – this side of the House, together with the industry, because we also had to deal with currents fomented by those in the PN,” he said.  “If it were for them, they’d have put us in a lockdown – God forbid we listened to them and the populism that they’re fixated on,” he said.

The PN, Bartolo said, has very little ideas to speak of – and the ideas that there are “will drive investors into the wall.”

He said that PN leader Bernard Grech had twice proven that he has “no interest in the tourism sector” – the first by “not giving the sector the importance it deserves” during his Budget response, and the second in a speech earlier on that same day.

“Today he wasted half an hour attacking my family and I on a personal level the likes of which we have never stooped to in this House, and so he confirmed the total absence of substance when it comes to this sector,” Bartolo said.

This was Bartolo’s only indirect reference to the ethics scandal that he has been embroiled in over a government job provided to his wife, Amanda Muscat.  Muscat was employed initially as a personal assistant to Bartolo before they got romantically involved with each other, but was then transferred to the Gozo Ministry on a €68,000 pay packet as a consultant – even though she was not qualified in the least for the post.

A Standards Commissioner report found that Muscat never did any work as a consultant and instead continued to work as Bartolo’s personal assistant – despite being paid as a consultant with a different ministry, on a different island.

This scandal went unmentioned in Bartolo’s speech, who instead chose to focus totally on the tourism industry that he is responsible for.

He said that the excellent tourism results of the past years had allowed the government the luxury of choice now.  The choice is to not focus on the number of tourists coming to Malta but to look at what type of tourist the country wants.

“We have a chance to take tourism a step forward so it can be sustainable, higher quality and year-round,” he said.

“The numbers mentality has to end,” Bartolo said, adding that new metrics for gauging the industry’s success should be based on three things.

The first is the “experience” of both the tourist and of the local society which is ultimately hosting them; the second is the spend of each tourist while they are in Malta; and the third is the number of bed nights spent in the country.

“If we do not offer quality, then we will not get quality,” Bartolo said.  He said that many in the hospitality sector have taken a step forward but some still lag behind. “The level of service has to improve for everyone,” he said

He then turned his eyes onto the PN, labelling some of the party’s ideas as “dangerous” and saying that others – such as proposing a marketing drive to increase tourism in winter and encouraging eco-friendly practices – are already being done.

An idea that the PN wrote in its pre-budget document – which was never published by the party, but was leaked by the PL – was to cap the number of beds in hotels, Bartolo observed, but the PN’s own tourism spokesperson Mario De Marco had said he disagreed with it.

“This is a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing,” he said.

Another idea that the PN had was to place a maximum number of days that one can rent a place to tourists to. “So they might place a limit of three months – then what do you do during the remaining months?  How do you pay your bank loan?  Will the Opposition leader, who is without substance, give you the solution?” 

“They want people to go bankrupt.  That’s where they’d get to, because they don’t know any better.  They want to choose when you can rent out your property,” Bartolo said.

“They will take tourism back 12 years,” he said.