This, he said, made all the ministers and parliamentary secretaries “Tourism Ministers” because whatever they are responsible for, be it roads, the environment and competitiveness, for example, all have a bearing on Malta’s tourism industry.

Dr Zammit Dimech said that to continue showing how much the government believed in the industry, it commissioned auditing company Deloitte and Touche to draw up a report on the Malta Tourism Authority’s relevance and effectiveness in its operations.

The MTA was set up in 1999 as a one-stop shop for anything related to tourism. The authority has nearly 200 employees, 41 members on five different boards, four semi-autonomous directorates, a chief executive officer and six divisions.

Deloitte was commissioned to review MTA’s operating framework and recommend how it could be restructured in order to improve its overall efficiency, effectiveness and accountability. As part of its exercise, Deloitte held widespread consultation meetings with the MTA at all levels.

In its report, the company highlighted the MTA’s cumbersome internal structures that have resulted in an unclear chain of command, excessive internal fragmentation, unnecessary territoriality, ineffective internal coordination and weak communication.

They attributed these weakness primarily to the inherent difficulties associated with trying to operate an organisation made up of four virtually autonomous directorates, each with its independent board and several distinct committees.

Deloitte recommended that the structure of the MTA should be radically streamlined into one cohesive unit led by one board of directors. The new-look organisation will have two operating divisions to reflect its core dual responsibilities as a regulator and a promoter of the tourism industry.

It is also being recommended that the size of the board be scaled down to a more manageable size and that it should include key officers of the organisation in order to better the decision-making and implementation process, while improving accountability and clear leadership structures.

The report stresses the importance of the involvement of the private sector and should be retained as a critically important ingredient to any recommended solution. One of the major issues Deloitte highlighted in its report was MTA’s lack of measurable targets, not even in its own strategic plan.

Deloitte highlighted that MTA’s expenditure in marketing has declined in recent years. In fact, the company continued that the MTA spent less on marketing due to its rising payroll, as well as administrative and indirect costs.

Deloitte also noted that the manner in which MTA’s marketing is planned and executed could be improved upon. It also said that MTA needed to put forward a radically different integrated strategic planning process whereby the private sector put forward the building blocks of the process and the MTA translates these into overall Tourism Action Plan.