During this year's edition of the international trade fair, Boot, a leading trade event for water sport activities, which took place at the end of January in Dusseldorf, Germany, Malta was presented with the destination award for scuba diving.

Taucher.net, the largest German-speaking online portal for divers, participated for the first time in this ceremony and presented the award to the Maltese Islands as the tourism destination of the year 2018. Armin Süss, editor-in-chief of Taucher.net, presented this prestigious prize to Michaela Hempel, senior Marketing executive of the Malta Tourism Authority in Frankfurt Germany.

Malta was chosen since "the Maltese Islands cater for all aspects within the scuba diving community, with Malta playing an exciting, positive and pioneering role worldwide in relation to diving sports".

Sports activities have played a big part in aiding the Maltese Islands reduce seasonality as the majority of them can be performed throughout the year.

The MTA CEO, Paul Bugeja, commented on the importance of receiving such a prestigious award. "It is a great honour for the Maltese Islands to receive this award and it is sure to provide the destination with additional exposure."

Bugeja mentioned how this continues to build on the results relating to the German incoming market for 2017, where the number of incoming visitors increased by over 36,000 tourists, which is equivalent to over 23%. Despite the impressive growth which Malta has achieved from the German market, we believe that there is room for further growth and that this can be achieved.

"This means that incoming visitors from Germany now reaches just under 200,000, confirming it as the third largest incoming market."