The effect of Low Cost Carriers on the Maltese Tourism Industry

Background

Tourism in Malta is a vital contributor to the overall GDP and a major source of employment in the economic sector. Malta receives approximately, 1,130,000 tourists per year however, in the past years tourism in Malta has been affected by a series of events which led to a decline in the high number of visitors that Malta was receiving a decade ago.

One significant contributor to this has been the rise of low-cost carriers which have changed the face of tourism of the Maltese Islands. This type of service has proved to be a double edged sword where although these airlines have extended the tourist base from other parts of Europe, the island of Gozo in particular is losing its share of the domestic tourism. The Maltese that traditionally used to travel to Gozo for their weekend breaks now have another opportunity to go to European destinations at cheaper prices.

The Maltese government has also strived to diversify the sun sea product of which the islands’ are highly dependent. Malta’s overall tourism competitiveness was downgraded from the global 25th position the country was placed in by the World Economic Forum (WEF) a year ago to a 29th position for 2009.

Behavior over time

Tourism has mainly risen between 1987 and 1994 but after that time there has been little growth. Year 2006 recorded a significant drop in tourists compared to the previous and following years and thus led the Maltese government to introduce incentives to attract new airlines and new routes to encourage tourism growth from LCCs. These new services had a positive impact in attracting new European traffic which grew by 10.9% in 2007. This also led to a significant increase in tourist numbers especially the UK market which grew by 50,000. In the face of the global financial crisis, Malta’s tourism figures for 2008, which showed an increase of 3.8 per cent over 2007 in departing tourists and an increase of 2.2 per cent over 2007 in total nights spent by tourists was a positive sign for the local tourism industry. NSO figures also show that the number of tourist arrivals in January 2009 is 12,000 less than January 2008.

Existing Policies

The government action on tourism has focused on prioritizing the sector by diversifying tourism in terms of purpose of visit through effective marketing and branding. Another issue of concern to the Maltese Government is the attraction of a more affluent visitor to Malta, to shift the Islands’ dependence on tour operators, to increasing accessibility and to encourage a different kind of visitor. Incentives have been undertaken by the government to support these policies by introducing cost incentives for new routes to encourage LCCs to include Malta as a base in 2006 and to expand the country’s air links with European destinations. The most recent Tourism Policy for the Maltese Islands (2007–2011) strives to justify the recent changes by alluding to both tourism and broader economic policy objectives outlined:

1. An incentive to increase accessibility to and from Malta, not only for tourism but also for other economic activities.
2. A desire to attract new business catered by these carriers and which is not at the expense of existing business.
3. An aim to combine air carriers and different business (tour operator, independent).
4. Prohibit the reliance on any one air carrier or an overriding position of one carrier
5. Keep existing airlines which besides making Malta accessible for its major source markets it also provides interlinking traffic and connections to long haul source markets, whilst providing additional services such as cargo air services.
6. Adhere to the EU’s competitiveness and state aid regulations to ensure a level playing field for all airlines

(Ministry for Tourism and Culture, 2006, p.40).

Policy Concerns

The primary issue is whether in the longer term the LCCs will be able to attract different kinds of visitors to Malta. This will help the government achieve its objectives in generating more urban and cultural tourism and in reducing the seasonal pattern of tourism in Malta by attracting more winter tourists. However LCC travelers to Malta appear to be no more interested in history or culture than the typical tourist in past years. Moreover, they do not seem to be inclined to take short breaks or to travel more in winter. Ryanair actually blocked some of its routes in the 2008/2009 winter schedule for this off-peak season due to the high fuel prices which further discouraged flight operation with empty seats or short yields. The finding shows that Malta is being highly affected by falling international demand as a cause of the global recession, and is also offering tourists the least value for their money. However, a significant % of the visitors in 2007 who were first time visitors indicates that there is a high potential to attract a new type of customers to Malta.


Study purpose

The purpose of this study is to see whether LCCs are diversifying the demographics of tourism in Malta, the nationality of the visitors, and if the product is changing as well to the promotion of culture. This study will also elicit the success of the objectives of the government outlined in the Tourism policy for the Maltese Islands.

Questions that the study will address

*How many of the visitors that came to Malta from 2006 to 2008 via LCC have been newcomers to the islands?
*Are LCCs contributing to a decline in the domestic tourism or is it boosting tourism evenly in both islands?
*Are LCCs actually contributing to decreasing the average length of stay in the Maltese Islands?
*Are LCC passengers more interested in the islands’ history and culture?
*Will high fuel and airport costs eventually reduce the expansion of routes and therefore the growth in Malta by Low cost airlines?
*Are Low cost carriers merely facilitating existing custom in terms of tourism flows, or whether they are attracting a different kind of visitor?

Links

· http://www.independent.com.mt/news.asp?newsitemid=84173
· http://www.nso.gov.mt/site/page.aspx?pageid=56]
· http://www.independent.com.mt/news.asp?newsitemid=84173
· http://mta-news.info/0902/pr14/
· http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/2009/07/19/interview.html
· http://www.maltamediaonline.com/?p=5409
· www.mta.com.mt/uploads/3058/1285/Segments_report__2_.pdf
· www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20080418/local/ryanairmay-
cut-winter-routes-to-malta-because-of-costs
· www.nso.gov.mt
· http://www.mta-news.info/0705/

Faced on Facebook

The first decade of the millennium is dominated by constant interactions and connections between different individuals or organizations. Whereas chatlogs and emails where the most common way of keeping in touch and making new acquaintances, that need has grown to constantly keeping oneself updated on the personal life of other people and exposing oneself as well in the process. This has been facilitated by social networks which basically is a virtual community having profiles of individuals who freely choose to expose personal information and gives one the ability to keep up already existing relationships or else start new ones by adding friends to your profile. The more friends you have the more you are extending the chance of expanding your network of friends thereby increasing your “popularity”. The more applications that are added to the network, the more interesting it becomes and indirectly forces one to use them causing cravings and urges to check one’s profile every day, becoming an addiction in extreme cases. As the inventor of facebook himself, Mark Zuckerberg pointed out in Facebook blog, that nowadays Facebook is not just a small website but a fully fledged nation because if all the Facebook users are added up it would be sixth most populated country in the world telling us the sheer size of the social networks and particulary the most popular ones which are getting bigger day-by-day.

However such utilities also cause unintended consequences which are invisible to the users. These mainly include procrastination, phishing, routinization, ritualization, gossip and rumors leading to privacy invasions. However, in this case the unintended consequence are not necessarily negative. Having a large number of friends on Facebook increases the number of contacts available to a fast-growing company which is actively recruiting potential employees. Also, the huge infiltration of commercial messages most of which is spam, or sharing news about a job opening in a way that is beneficial is an effective way, probably the only one to use for business matters.

However, the users don’t think about what might happen if they disclose too much information relating to their private lives such as their place of work or telephone number. Otherwise they don’t use the options available in the site to set your set your settings to private even though complete privacy is not assured with utilities like Facebook. It is also a procrascination trap. Taking office workers as an example, who are also avid users of Facebook, the effects are being felt in several ways. It distracts workers from focusing wholly on their task, but also create more tangible problems especially in smaller offices where excessive online social networking can boost demand on bandwidth and cut into IT costs. Most fear that excessive time spent on such websites causes a loss in productivity as procrastination sets in. However, others view it as an effective networking tool that connects sales reps, marketers and other workers.

But facebook demography is also highly comprised of students who also fall into the trap of procrascination as facebook becomes embedded as a feature of our lives which we cannot live without. It eventually becomes a vicious cycle as time continues to be wasted and work postponed. However, the loop I chose to represent in the Causal loop diagram is a balancing loop relating to the high exposure devoted to the extra information added on the profile which is enough to cause privacy invasion in the form of phishing, hacking, harassment, gossip and data mining. This however annoys the user which becomes more aware of the risk being faced and therefore cautiously minimizes the amount of information shared and delete more "friends" which will eventually minimize the exposure of the user. The sad reality is that when everyone is on Facebook or other network site, its difficult to “hide out” even if you reject friend requests because the photos that you took last weekend with your friend could end up on the profile of your friend and either way tagging your name would still disclose your identity. Even decreasing your profile visibility by restricting access to friends is a weak mechanism.

Users therefore do not consider beyond the 'visible' which relates to the social networking and amusement from the user's perspective. There is another reality which is the 'invisible' part which essentially consists of the large network of detailed personal data that is voluntarily provided by the users themselves and can be used to be aggregated, filtered and re-organized for the purposes of targeted marketing or advertising, or abuse of the personal information by third parties to mention a few.

Social network services are conceptually designed to exposure of individuals and their exploitation of the social information users provide willingly rather than improving privacy levels. If a user is being hacked or rumours start spreading, a user prefers to lessen the amount of information provided rather than deleting his profile. This is because facebook has become something of a ritualization where you have to maintain communication via technology. Social networking is therefore embedded in a typical student’s life and is difficult to disengage. Most people have over 1,000 friends many of which would not be acquaintances. Therefore as time goes by and you start accumulating more friends and making more connections, you are unconcerned about temporal boundary intrusion (threats to privacy due to data persistence). The benefits of using Facebook outweigh privacy concern even when actual privacy invasion is experienced. When users chose to only “allow friends” they think that they did enough from security concerns. However, by restricting one’s profile and also the number of one’s friends one can put his mind at rest even though the risk Facebook creates to privacy should not be taken lightly in the first place. Safer use of social network sites would thus require a dramatic change in user attitudes.

Illegal Immigration and the Maltese context

The evolution of illegal immigration in Malta

Illegal immigration is one impending security challenge in the Mediterranean and particularly in Malta it is considered a "priority issue" since immigration rates are undermining the country's "national stability." Malta has strategically focused on illegal immigration as a primary foreign policy priority which has become a main concern on the international agenda of Europe's main security institutions. Illegal immigration is not a recent phenomenon in Malta. In fact Malta started experiencing the effects of illegal immigration in the early 1990s with the onset of the war between Yugoslavia and Iraq. The people who fled these areas relocated in Malta which is considered amongst the safest of countries to live in. The first vessles transporting migrants reached the Maltese waters in November 2001 carrying 57 immigrants. Since then the issue of illegal immigration has become more pronounced.

Malta acts as a bridge between the Mediterranean and Europe being situated just a few kilometers below Sicily. These immigrants are in search for a better life in the Western countries which unlike their home countries are free from social strife and civil and political unrest. Poverty is therefore the root cause of illegal immigration. Case in point, before the discovery of oil, Libyans migrated to better regions but now oil has made Libya a country of destination. The number of immigrants in Malta in 2002 amounted to more than 1,600. However, a year later, the number of migrants arriving in Malta again dropped considerably to around 500, but this decline proved to be only temporary, with an increase to more than 1,700 in 2004. Since then, this figure fluctuates between 1,500 and 2,500 per year. Researchers attribute Malta's accession in the European Union to the sudden surge of illegal immigration in 2002 and 2004. Amongst the other members of the EU, Malta has experienced the largest influx of irregular immigrants. Malta already suffers from a high population density which is a determining factor in the depletion of resources like natural groundwater. Therefore it comes to no surprise that the regular influx of illegal immigrants especially in calm weather, is increasing the burden on the Maltese government and citizens alike. This manifests itself in financial costs, domestic, political and cultural costs and the external influence costs. The third type of cost infers that an effect on Europe's influence in the world cannot be avoided.

Challenges

An inflow of 2,000 migrants into Malta equates to more than four hundred thousand arriving in Germany, or to around three hundred thousand entering France, the UK, or Italy. Most immigrants are coming from Western Africa with Somalia being the most popular country of origin of asylum seekers. Most of these immigrants are repatriated or resettled in countries which are willing to offer asylum, in particular the United States. However, the intention of most immigrants is to reach the shores of European countries other than Malta. Our neighboring islands, Sicily and Lampedusa are also facing Malta's same problems and risk factors. Lampedusa however, is not experiencing the severity of the consequences as Malta is doing as most of the immigrants are transferred to mainland Italy; the same with those arriving in the Canary Islands which are relocated in Spain.




Crisis management should be employed to avoid deaths in the open seas. Human trafficking is an organized crime and the transportation of illegal immigrants generates billions of dollars in annual business worldwide. So far, the EU's fledging border control agency FRONTEX has not been successful in curbing boatloads of immigrants from reaching the shores of Mediterranean countries.

Prosperous and aging Europe and highly populated, economically underdeveloped North Africa are two opposing realities divided by the Mediterranean Sea. However, although these immigrants can compensate for the declining workforce in Europe, the immigrants that arrive are not adapted to and lack the skills for the type of work demand and most often end up exploited. One such measure to limit illegal immigration that has scarcely been employed in the Southern European context is sanctions on employers who intentionally hire unauthorized immigrants.

Improving the current situation

Malta has been implementing a comprehensive foreign policy strategy to raise awareness and also take the necessary action to deal more effectively with this new form of human slavery that dominates modern Euro-Mediterranean relations. It has also been calling for more support and for burden-sharing mechanisms from other EU countries that have the geographical space and resources to cope with an influx of immigrants.

Main organizations such as the G8, the Commonwealth and the United Nations play a significant role in the war against poverty mainly through funding programs which however have to be better distributed. Ulitmately, as long as countries of origin, transit and destination meet and propose solutions to mitigate the problem, the situation will not get any better. For example Libya which is an important transit country has to improve its efforts to increase border surveillance. The north-south, socio-economic situation should therefore form the basis of a long term strategy to better control illegal immigration.


Links

http://mq.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/20/1/119 [Accessed 12/01/10]
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=234810&jid=ERW&volumeId=12&issueId=03&aid=234809 [Accessed 12/01/10]
http://www.taurillon.org/Illegal-immigration-and-Malta [Accessed 12/01/10]
http://www.alertnet.org/db/an_art/55866/2009/11/1-143347-1.htm [Accessed 12/01/10]
http://www.thinkingeurope.eu/images/upload/Gonzi.pdf [Accessed 12/01/10]
http://www.workpermit.com/news/2006_07_04/europe/malta_illegal_immigration.htm [Accessed 12/01/10]

Welcome to Steph's blog

Hi, I'm Stephanie Farrugia. I hail from Victoria, Gozo's capital city. I'm an outdoor type of person and grasp every opportunity not to stay locked at home. I'm an avid internet user, and enjoy listening to music more than anything else. I'm also into animal awareness and welfare. The SERM program is quite challenging especially considering that it being offered for the first time. Most of the content of the course is new to me so sometimes it results a little bit tough to work through but overall all the study units so far have kept me interested.

After I finish the course I'm definitely planning to go on a vacation but still undecided about the destination.