Supercities.eu is the latest concept dreamt up by Joe Grima, a man who has lived all his life completely fascinated by the media. For him, the Internet is merely an extension of his first love – broadcasting.

This man has certainly had his share of ups and downs, including being the victim of arson attacks that completely destroyed all his personal belongings. He went from being the chief Executive of the Broadcasting Authority to becoming Tourism Minister. From creating his own radio station, to writing a weekly column for this paper and di-ve.com, to a stint hosting his own programme on NET TV (much to the mortification of Nationalist supporters), Joe Grima continues to be in the limelight.

He is fully aware that to many people he will always be remembered as one of the most powerful (not always loved) men during the Mintoff administration in the 1980s.

Once you have been labelled a politician, it is very hard to shake it off.

These days, however, his interest lies in combining his knowledge of the tourism industry with the vast possibilities of the worldwide web.

“Basically, the only thing I’ve been trained for in life is the electronic media and I’ve always taken an interest in the development of what was one of the most interesting periods of my life when I was Tourism Minister. At first I refused to do it after the re-shuffle (Joe Grima was originally Industry Minister), but then when I went into it I found that it was very interesting; a huge challenge. I was thrown into it when Malta had lost a quarter of a million tourists in one year, when people were thinking that tourism was dead.”

Much like it is now…?

“Well, now it’s on the way back. We went through a recent period which was very similar to the one I went through.”

I point out that tourism does sometimes go through cycles and although he agrees, he adds a “but”.

“But a lot of it is just planning, knowing your competitors very well, keeping track of what they’re doing and one-upmanship. That’s tourism. And remember in tourism, the good decisions you make today you will feel a year later, but the same also goes for the bad decisions – you will feel them a year later when you can’t do anything about them. In the 1980s a lot of English people were looking for a place in the sun when Spain had huge problems, so we gained many tourists from Spain.”

But then, I remind him, Spain did something about it, like reclaiming back certain land and tearing down the more atrocious hotels.

“Of course, and when Spain settled down, those who had come to Malta for that reason, went back. In the meantime we had built huge hotels and apartments and they ended up simply empty. So what we had to do was to stem the slide and slowly come back. The record I left behind is still unmatched; when I left it stood at a 26 per cent increase in arrivals. Which is why I’ve been yearning to get back into tourism, even though I usually say one should never go back!”

And so www.supercities.eu was born.

“I’ve been using computers and the Internet ever since they came in, so when tourism problems started getting bigger and bigger, I knew it was time to do something. We created this website because I understand that today’s selling tools are so totally different from the 1980s. When the Americans attacked Libya, and we lost all our European bookings in a flash, we went round Europe and gave 16 press conferences in 11 days in different countries. I went on Mike Buongiorno’s programme to explain to Italians that we are not part of Libya and at the time those were very legitimate tools. Today, the biggest and best tool is the Internet, because people book online. Before they used to want to see what the prices are, but today they want to see what they’re booking. We have invented two new ways of using the Internet. First, we do everything on video, not by clicking on photos – we show a restaurant or a hotel by showing you a film. We present the tourism infrastructure on video. The website itself is attractive and is linked to other websites, the best of which is www.visitmalta.”

The supercities.eu website is sponsored by the Tourism and Culture Ministry, but Joe Grima is still looking for a strategic partner. “My dream is to offer this service for free. That would give us a number of advantages because when we provide a free service, we can choose the face of Malta that we want to present and not have to bow down to commercial demands. If it’s free, we can do it quicker and better. However, so far there’s still a small charge.”

The official launch for the project is on Tuesday, 24 April, and Joe is hoping for this kind of sponsor to materialise by then.

So how does it work?

“Well, basically anyone who offers a tourism-related service can be on this website. For the time being, it will be translated into English, French and German but we have an agreement with the Malta Tourism Authority to go into other languages later. We can create a video for those who don’t have one, using the services of Bonaci Media Entertainment. The charge will include the one-minute video, which is on the Internet for one whole year – every minute of that year you can have someone clicking onto your product or service. However, if someone already has a commercial ready, we can just convert it into Internet language and put it in.”

By “we” Joe Grima is referring to his company, International Communications Corporation, the same company that produced his successful 1994 series Streets. The key players include a flash expert from China, Una Ma, who originated the first website for supercities.eu. The webmaster is South African IT expert Philippe Lenferma de la Motte, while the text is written by freelance journalist Terence Mirabelli. The producer is Anna Maria Grima, who has been working with Joe Grima for several years; she visits the establishment and draws up what the owner wants to say. Sam Mifsud from the MTA and Maltacom, who host the website on their server, have also been invaluable to the success of this project.

“Our target market is those Europeans who take their holidays in Europe – that is around 370 million people. From our research, we have found that most people who use the Internet understand English.”

While promotion is always a good thing, how do we get around the problem of tourists coming here and finding they are not happy with product Malta? For example, you come to a hotel and find you have a construction site next door?

“Nobody can survive those problems,” he admits. “Those are insurmountable problems – when the client is not satisfied, there is no way you can bring him back unless you convince him otherwise. But if he’s disappointed while he’s here most of the time we lose him. However, Malta now needs to first regenerate the numbers.”

But isn’t that a Catch 22 situation, I ask him, my mind flitting back to the infamous Brand Malta fiasco. Joe, however, is more optimistic.

“There is a strong effort at improving the product by MTA. We still have problems and unfortunately, they are continuously highlighted by those who seem to enjoy showing how ‘bad’ things are. I feel there is a movement towards improving the product, but it’s a slow, expensive process which is easier said than done.”

I ask Joe whether he thinks today’s tourist still simply seeks out the sun and sea.

“Well, let’s not discard the sun and sea but I think the major attractions are the friendliness of the people and easy access – don’t send me from one place to another to get something! When we understand the nitty-gritty of the problems and start to tick them off one by one, we will get there.”

Even the hotels that have closed down don’t seem to dampen Joe Grima’s confidence: “Only a certain type of hotel is closing down”, he points out. “Maybe we are suffering from mistaken decisions in the past. One of the problems this country has had is that five-star hotels have not been able to charge five-star prices for years. Last year was a disaster, and one bad year takes you back five years. Four-star prices have had to go down to three-star, and three-star went down to two-star – so the two and three-star hotels were unsustainable because they have their expenses too. This has been a natural consequence of the decisions taken in 1987 and 1988, when Malta went for five-star hotels, when we said we don’t want the type of tourists that the previous government got. They even had a name for them, which is something you should never do – you should never call tourists names! We said we wanted higher-class tourists – but if tourists fill your pockets, you can’t afford to insult them.

“Plus, don’t forget the biggest spenders are the middle classes because they come here with Lm400 and they spend it all! Those kinds of tourists were our fortune in the 1980s, they were our major market. There was a theory before I went to the Ministry – ‘We have the sun and the sea, if they don’t want to come it’s their business’. I was actually told this, but it’s not like that at all, of course. Everyone is fighting for tourists and we are now in the process of attracting them back to Malta by showing them this series of attractive videos on our website. We’re connecting the tourist who is looking for a destination with the tourist who wants to know what he can do when he’s here. You are showing him this in an interesting manner with today’s modern tools.”