Malta’s tourism industry has never been busier. Tourist arrivals reached approximately four million last year, more than double the 1.8 million recorded in 2015. Total tourism expenditure climbed to €3.9 billion. By any conventional measure, the sector is thriving.
But conventional measures can be misleading. When we adjust for inflation, average spending per tourist has actually fallen, from €919 in 2015 to €771 in 2025. That is a 16 per cent decline over a decade. Tourists are also staying for less time, with the average length of stay dropping from 7.9 nights to 6.3. Malta is welcoming more visitors than ever, yet extracting less real value from each one. This is the paradox at the heart of our current model, and the reason The Malta Chamber launched Rediscover to Align: Malta Chamber Tourism Vision 2026 on 16 March.
Watch the Malta Chamber’s Press Conference on ‘Rediscover to Align’: https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1i6mNSLB8g/
From recovery to stewardship
This document did not emerge from a vacuum. During the pandemic, The Malta Chamber asked a question that went beyond the immediate crisis: what should Malta’s tourism look like in the future? That process led to the original Rediscover document in 2021, which I helped develop in my role within the Chamber’s Tourism Operators Business Section. Rediscover to Align is the next step, produced with technical support from EY Parthenon and drawing on consultation with more than 30 stakeholders across the public and private sectors.
The central argument is straightforward. The challenge is no longer recovery. It is stewardship. Malta now records approximately 7,500 tourists for every 1,000 residents, placing us alongside Venice and Dubrovnik among Europe’s most tourism-intense destinations. During peak summer months, the island’s effective population doubles. This creates real pressure on roads, utilities, heritage sites and coastal ecosystems. The question is not whether we can attract more tourists. It is whether we can attract the right tourists, at the right price, with the right experience, while managing costs and impacts effectively.
Three pillars, over 115 measures
Rediscover to Align is structured around three strategic pillars.
The first focuses on improving the visitor journey and reshaping the tourism offer. This means the Malta Tourism Authority placing greater emphasis on value rather than sheer volume, stronger promotion of Malta’s heritage, gastronomy and cultural identity, and expanding experience-driven tourism niches. It also means moving from “more beds to better beds,” including a review of hotel planning incentives and ensuring that tourism development is aligned with infrastructure capacity. The hotel height incentive, which has shifted from a supply-side tool to a purely speculative mechanism, should be removed. Short-let accommodation needs proper regulation, with platforms required to share data with local councils, tiered taxation linked to the intensity of short-term rental activity, and enforcement against unlicensed operators.
The second pillar centres on authenticity and environmental protection. It calls for a national aesthetics and landscape policy, stronger safeguards for Malta’s streetscapes and village identities, firmer protection of ODZ areas, and a renewed Strategic Plan for the Environment and Development that clearly defines what is commercial and what is residential. Local councils must be part and parcel of this. If residents are not proud of their neighbourhoods, visitors will not find them worth visiting either.
The third pillar addresses governance and institutional coordination. Tourism cannot continue to be managed in silos. Planning, heritage, education, transport, the environment and cleanliness all have a direct bearing on the visitor experience, even though they fall outside the Tourism Ministry’s remit. The document proposes stronger cross-ministerial collaboration, the creation of a Tourism Resilience and Reinvestment Reserve, industry-led skills frameworks, and improved working conditions within the sector.
The public conversation
I had the opportunity to discuss these themes in two television appearances during March. On NET Live (25 March), the focus was on why Malta needs to shift towards a quality-driven tourism model and what that means in practical terms. On Il-Punt, also on NET Television, the conversation widened to cover the challenges, opportunities and future direction of the sector as a whole.
These are conversations that need to happen in public, not just in policy documents. The numbers tell a clear story: Malta cannot keep going down the road of purely attracting more and more visitors without giving attention to quality. If that approach continues, we will have worse results, quality-wise, not better ones.
Watch the NET Live discussion: https://netondemand.mt/play/34815
Watch the Attwalità discussion: https://www.facebook.com/newsbook.com.mt/videos/attwalita-bidla-fid-direzzjoni-tat-turi%C5%BCmu/1548357493480026/
What happens next
The document contains over 115 proposals, more than half of which are new. It has already received endorsement from across the political spectrum, with Momentum publicly backing the strategy’s direction on accommodation supply management and the removal of the two-storey hotel height policy. The Malta Independent’s editorial board described it as the kind of holistic study Malta needs to avoid going the way of other European cities that have been overwhelmed by tourism.
But proposals are only as good as their implementation. The idea behind the entire document is not to handle more, but to handle it better. If you handle it better, you can give more value to the tourist. If you give more value to the tourist, they return, they stay longer, they spend more. The opposite also holds: tourists are not willing to be overcharged for something if they do not perceive value.
No single measure will do the trick. What is needed is continuous improvement of the product we present to visitors, constant renewal of infrastructure while retaining local character and aesthetics, and genuine alignment between authorities, operators and residents. No one in the world is Maltese except Malta. That distinctiveness is our greatest asset, and it is what we need to protect and build upon.
If it works for residents, it will work for tourists.
The full Rediscover to Align document can be downloaded from The Malta Chamber’s website.
Press coverage: Negozju bla Fruntieri – by Malta Business Bureau · Attwalità on RTK103 · Newsbook · The Malta Independent · Times of Malta · Malta Business Weekly · Vi jew Va on Radju Malta and TVM · Net Live on Net TV · Il-Punt on Net TV · WhosWho.mt · MaltaCeos.mt · Malta Chamber launch of Rediscover to Align press conference