Yesterday morning, I heard on the radio a Super One commentator who was ranting about the cost of buying a return ticket for a helicopter flight to Gozo. The way he was going on, you would think that helicopter travel is an essential service, like buses, instead of a form of luxury travel for the privileged. I don’t like that way of thinking. It smacks too much of rabid socialism and Labour policies that we would rather forget. Just because there is a helicopter service between Malta and Gozo, it doesn’t mean that it has to be affordable to every Tom, Dick and Harry, and on a routine basis, what’s more. This is like saying that all hotels should be five-star and cost Lm5 a night, so that everyone can have access to them.

If the helicopter service were the only way of getting to Gozo and back to Malta, then the Lm50 return ticket for ‘foreigners’ and the Lm30 for Maltese (why the discrepancy – surely it’s against the rules?) would be a problem. But it is not the only form of travel available between the two islands. There’s an excellent ferry service which has become super-efficient of late, and which costs just Lm2 for the return trip, whether you’re Maltese or not.

Helicopter travel has always been for those who are relatively well off, and nothing is going to change that. A helicopter can take very few passengers, and with the fees paid by those few, it is difficult even to cover the huge running costs, let alone make any sort of worthwhile profit. Only the truly spoilt or difficult, or those who are thoroughly ignorant and live in a kind of bubble, would demand affordable helicopter travel.

Nobody uses helicopters to get from A to B on a regular basis unless they are wealthy and own their own personal chopper and landing pad at home and at the office. For the rest of us ordinary mortals, flying anywhere by helicopter is a special treat in itself, rather than a means of getting somewhere. Frank Salt had the right approach to it in his comments in The Times yesterday – the article which, I now realise, provoked the faux anger of the Super One commentator. He saw the helicopter trip that he and his wife took to Gozo, where they spent the day, and back as part of a relaxing day out, rather than as glorified public transport. It was all part of the fun. That’s the spirit.

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I parted company with Mr Salt only where he said that the Lm50 helicopter return ticket is too much for tourists when compared to the cost of their holiday. In what way is it too much? They don’t have to go to Gozo by helicopter. They can take the ferry. We underestimate visitors to the Maltese islands. We assume that they are as spoilt as we are, and that they demand to get anywhere in a maximum of 20 minutes for not more than Lm3. Yet these are people who are used to paying heavily for public transport to get to and from their daily jobs, or who spend hours in traffic jams instead. To get to the airport and back in their own country, they have to overcome several hurdles. They are used to paying for transport. They are accustomed to spending time getting somewhere. They do not think that the distance between Gudja airport and the Cirkewwa ferry terminal is great, as we define it. On the contrary, it is a very short distance to them, and it is a very short distance in truth, full stop.

We imagine that everyone else sees time and distance through our eyes, raised as we are on a minuscule island. We can be silly sometimes.

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There is a helicopter service between several of the many Greek islands, but those helicopters are used mainly by tycoons, Greek or otherwise. Everyone else takes the ferry, and for the farther islands, a small plane. The ferry boats are nowhere near as comfortable as those operated by Gozo Channel, because they are seen as the public buses of the seas, even if the trip between one island and another can take six hours. They are far from cheap, and getting on them involves queuing at the dock without shelter from the heat, with all your suitcases heaped around you, until the chaotic system decides that boarding should begin, whereupon everyone surges forward like cattle among the cars. Incidentally, the word ‘suitcases’ has reminded me of my irritation that it has been dropped from the English language as used in Malta, to be oddly substituted by ‘luggage’. Please, everybody, luggage is a collective noun. It does not mean the same thing as ‘suitcase’. Many suitcases are not many ‘luggages’. They are luggage.

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There is also a helicopter service in New York City. Only the fairly wealthy use it. The truly wealthy have their own helicopters. For tourists like we were some years ago, there was another kind of helicopter service altogether – the sort that you would use in the same spirit that Frank Salt took the helicopter to Gozo – for fun. You pay a small fortune, then you get whizzed around the Manhattan skyline for a few minutes. Most people compare prices to what they get in return, but then we see what we get in return in different ways. The Super One commentator would get public transport to and from Gozo in return for his Lm30 helicopter ticket. Frank Salt got some fun and an interesting experience. What I got in return for the most expensive 10 minutes in my life was the amazed expression on my sons’ faces as they dipped past the world’s most famous skyscrapers. We all have different priorities as to what is worth spending money on.

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We are so accustomed to doing things on the cheap in our own lives – and on our own holidays – that we imagine that those who come here have the same approach. Yes, thousands of visitors here are penny-pinching, and that is the problem – that we seek to accommodate the holiday misers and even to attract more of them by trimming our prices down to the point where we have to compromise quality. It costs a lot to host tourists in Malta, where resources are scarce and expensive to produce – think water and electricity – and where the infrastructure is already heavily burdened by the overcrowded native population – think drains and sewage. We can’t afford to have a disproportionate number of the cheapo crowd, because they have ended up costing us more than they leave behind.

The trouble is not that the helicopter service is too expensive, but that our tourists are too cheap. Even if they had the money, it wouldn’t occur to them to take the trip for fun, and make a Disneyworld ride out of it.

On that Manhattan holiday, I woke up one morning and decided it would be a good idea to go to Niagara Falls, over the border in Canada, for the day. The day’s trip for the five of us cost much more than the entire holiday for one of us, and involved two hours of flying, there and back, plus plenty of driving and taxis to and from La Guardia airport. It was just an everyday excursion for the company who organised it, and who would probably laugh themselves sick at the knots into which we tie ourselves up about getting to Gozo for the day. My other half did his spot of grumbling, as men will: “Spending all that money in a day! My God!” He changed his way of looking at it when I pointed out that we were not spending all that money in a day, we were spending it once in a lifetime. We would never again in our lives go to Niagara Falls, because it’s not the kind of thing you do more than once, and certainly not with our sons. To my mind, it would have been the height of bad decisions to be so close and yet not go, just so as not to ‘spend all that money in one day’.

Holidays are not daily life, so the parameters you use for making decisions while on holiday should not be the same as those you use for making decisions back home. While on holiday, you are buying experiences, and some experiences are priceless in that you will carry them with you as memories well into old age, when the objects you might have spent the money on instead have long ceased to hold their value, even if they still exist at all.

Just as holidays are not daily life, so helicopters are not public buses. They fall into the realm of the extraordinary, unless you are a mini-tycoon. The boring thing about socialists is that they fail to understand the concept of the extraordinary. They think everything would be best if it were reduced to a single pedestrian level, preferably in monotone.